Temperature characteristics and analysis of monolithic microwave CMOS distributed oscillators with Gm-varied gain cells and folded coplanar interconnects

  • Authors:

  • Kalyan Bhattacharyya;Ted H. Szymanski

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India and Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada;Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The performance of a novel Monolithic Microwave CMOS Distributed Oscillator is reported over a temperature range of -25°C to 75°C for the first time, along with an analysis of its design characteristics and its temperature stability. The oscillator is stable over the entire temperature range of 100°C. The monolithic distributed oscillator (DO) is designed and fabricated in an industry standard 0.18 µm CMOS process, using an n-FET-based traveling wave amplifier (TWA), coplanar waveguides (CPW), and a new coplanar interconnect structure called a 'folded CPW'. The measured loss of the "folded CPW" is 1.259 dB at 10 GHz. The distributed oscillator uses a novel architecture of Gm-varied gain cells and operates at a bias of 1.8 V. The measured oscillation frequency is 11.7 GHz with 6.1 dBm output power and the measured phase noise is -116.02 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset, which represent the best reported power and one of the best phase noise results for silicon DOs with temperature stability.