CMOS High Swing and Q Boosted Dual Core Voltage Controlled Oscillator for 5G New Radio Application

This paper describes a low power, low phase noise CMOS voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) with a cascoded cross-coupled pair (XCP) configuration for high data rate 5G New Radio (5G-NR) applications. The core consists of a primary auxiliary VCO built as a negative conductance circuit to improve phase noise and a secondary core with a cascoded formation to increase output voltage swing. A switched varactor array (SVA) wideband tuner is integrated for a wide bandwidth application in a low power implementation. The dual-core VCO was designed in CMOS 130 nm technology and occupies only 1.05 mm2 of space. With a supply voltage of 1.2 V, the VCO achieved a tuning range of 32.43% from 3.45 GHz to 4.47 GHz. At 3.96 GHz carrier center frequency with 1 MHz offset, the total power consumption is 0.7 mW with a corresponding phase noise (PN) of −121.25 dBc/Hz and a Figure of Merit (FoM) of 193.25 dBc/Hz. The results are validated using Cadence Spectra RF simulations.