1mW 4-5GHz packaged VCO with bonding-to-ground inductors

A packaged VCO, which utilizes the heat-sink pad in Quad Flat Pack No-Lead (QFN) package to provide a ground connection for bonding wire inductors, is presented in this paper. The proposed VCO is designed to cover 4 to 5 GHz band and is able to work under a minimum of 0.9 V DC supply voltage with only 1 mW power consumption. It is fabricated in 0.18 μm standard CMOS process. It achieves the FOM of -193 dBc/Hz, and the measured frequency variation is less than 11%.