A 0.5~0.7 V LC digitally controlled oscillator based on a multi-stage capacitance shrinking technique

Abstract

This paper presents a 2.4 GHz LC digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) at near-threshold supplies (0.5~0.7 V). It was a challenge to achieve a low voltage, low power, and high resolution simultaneously. DCOs with metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) varactors consume low power, but their resolution is limited. ∆Σ-DCOs can achieve a high resolution at the cost of high power consumption. A multi-stage capacitance shrinking technique was proposed in this paper to address the tradeoff mentioned above. The unit variable capacitance of the LC tank was largely reduced by the bridging capacitors and the number of stages. A current-reuse technique was used to further lower the power. Based on the above techniques, the prototype was fabricated using a 130-nm complementary MOS (CMOS) technology with multiple supplies (0.5~0.7 V for the DCO core, 1.2 V for the buffer). The measurement results showed that the phase noise at a 0.6-V supply was −126.27 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz and −125.9480 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz at the carriers of 2.4 GHz and 2.5 GHz, respectively. The best figure of merit (FoM) of 195.68 was obtained when VDD = 0.6 V. The DCO core consumed 1.1 mA at a 0.6-V supply.