A 2.4 GHz Low Power Low Phase-Noise Enhanced FOM VCO for RF Applications Using 180 nm CMOS Technology

The Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) is an important component of the transceiver which consumes significant energy as compared to the other transceiver components. Since RF application systems such as WiFi, Bluetooth or Zigbee uses battery energy, it is necessary to reduce the power consumption while maintaining reasonable system performance. In this work, the performance of standard VCOs is studied and a new design method of CMOS VCO is proposed. The architecture of the proposed VCO is based on the negative resistance based LC tank circuit using MOSFET. The performance of the proposed VCO is compared in terms of phase noise, figure-of-merit (FOM) and power consumption. The phase noise and FOM of the proposed design is - 124 and - 187.25 dBc/Hz respectively at 1 MHz offset frequency with power consumption of 2.86 mW. It has been observed that the proposed VCO can be a suitable candidate for low power RF circuit applications while maintaining reasonable performance metrics.