Design Of Millimeter-wave Voltage-controlled Oscillator In CMOS Technology

Over the past decade, with the rapid development of wireless communication systems, especially the rise of mobile internet and personal wireless smart devices, modern wireless communication systems need more and more transmission rate, and traditional wireless transmission standards and frequency band have been unable to meet the demand of future wireless communication system. The current wireless system’s radio spectrum, limited spectrum bandwidth resource, seriously restricted the advancement of high speed wireless systems. Millimeter wave band as a new hotspot, a lot of spectrum resources are not used, it has a great potential in the personal wireless communications, biomedical, imaging, guidance and so on, which attracted wide attention in both academia and industry. With CMOS process to continue to progress, the current CMOS technology based on millimeter wave chip’s performance has met even exceeded the traditional III-V element’s millimeter wave circuits, while CMOS process has small size, low power consumption and low cost. Therefore, the study of high-performance, high-speed, low-power CMOS chip becomes the current research hotspot for academia.In the millimeter-wave wireless communication system, the frequency source is essential to communication device, it is intended to provide a local oscillator signal for transceiver system. Its tuning range, phase noise and frequency stability for entire communication quality is critical. This paper aims to design low power dissipation and low phase noise voltage-controlled oscillator based on CMOS process, this paper is divided into the following sections.First, this paper introduces the basic knowledge of VCO, introduces two basic oscillation models for the oscillator circuit and passive elements of millimeter wave voltage-controlled oscillators, which arises to the challenges in the millimeter wave band, and the design ideas about the VCO.Secondly, this paper analyzes the phase noise models about the voltage-controlled oscillator circuit, introduces two main existing phase noise model, Lesson and Hajimiri noise model, gives a deeper understanding of the VCO phase noise sources in macro point. These lead to some improvement methods about the VCO’s phase noise, so we can design a high-performance voltage-controlled oscillator.Finally, this paper designed a Q band voltage-controlled oscillator based on 90 nm CMOS process and designed a V-band voltage-controlled oscillator base on 65 nm CMOS process. Where Q band voltage-controlled oscillator using LC-tank structure, due to the large parasitic effects in millimeter wave band, so give up the method of extracting the parasitic parameters in low frequency voltage-controlled oscillator, while using HFSS to do post-simulation for the layout. V band voltage-controlled oscillator absorbs the experience of former design, and introduces class-C and injection locking technique to improve phase noise.