A 12-GHz low-phase-noise voltage-controlled oscillator using novel field-plate CMOS transistors

This paper presents a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with low-phase-noise performance based on 0.13-μm fieldplate (FP) CMOS transistors. The proposed FP transistors exhibit lesser flicker noise (1/f noise) than the standard transistors because electron flow is suppressed in the deeper channel. Cross-coupled 12-GHz VCO with standard and FP transistors was simultaneously designed and fabricated in a TSMC 0.13-μm CMOS process. The measured phase noise of this novel design is -122 dBc/Hz at an offset frequency of 1 MHz. This novel design offered an average 5-dBc phase-noise improvement over the VCO with standard transistors at offset frequencies from 100 kHz to 1 MHz.