Design and analysis of a three-stage voltage-controlled ring oscillator

This paper describes a large tuning range low phase noise voltage-controlled ring oscillator （ring VCO） based on a different cascade voltage logic delay cell with current-source load to change the current of output node. The method for optimization is presented. Furthermore, the analysis of performance of the proposed ring VCO is confirmed by the measurement results. The three-stage proposed ring VCO was fabricated in the 180-nm CMOS process of SMIC. The measurement results show that the oscillator frequency of the ring VCO is from 0.77O to 5.286 GHz and the phase noise is 97.93 dBc/Hz at an offset of 1 MHz from 5.268 GHz with a total power of 15.1 mW from a 1.8 V supply while occupying only 0.00175 mm2 of the core die area.