A low power, wide range VCO with automatic amplitude calibration loop

This paper presents a low-power VCO with automatic amplitude control loop to compensate for the process, voltage and temperature variation. The settling time of the loop is less than 300 ns in the SS corner case. Adaptive body-biasing (ABB) technique is also adopted to minimize the power consumption by lowering the threshold voltage of transistors in the negative-Gm core. The power consumption is 350 ¿W and the phase noise at the 1 MHz offset is -117 dBc/Hz when the VCO frequency is 3.2 GHz.