A 1.9 GHz low-phase-noise complementary cross-coupled FBAR-VCO without additional voltage headroom in 0.18 μm CMOS technology

A 1.9 GHz film bulk acoustic resonator (FBAR)-based low-phase-noise complementary cross-coupled voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is presented. The FBAR-VCO is designed and fabricated in 0.18 μ m CMOS process. The DC latch and the low frequency instability are resolved by employing the NMOS source coupling capacitor and the DC blocked cross-coupled pairs. Since no additional voltage headroom is required, the proposed FBAR-VCO can be operated at a low power supply voltage of 1.1 V with a wide voltage swing of 0.9 V. An effective phase noise optimization is realized by a reasonable trade-off between the output resistance and the trans-conductance of the cross-coupled pairs. The measured performance shows the proposed FBAR-VCO achieves a phase noise of-148 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset with a figure of merit (FoM) of-211.6 dB.