Design methodologies of CMOS voltage-controlled oscillators and low-noise amplifiers with emphasis on integrated inductors

Abstract

Wireless communications have progressed remarkably in the last decade. The popularization of cellular phones has driven much of the research activity. CMOS technology provides such advantages as low cost, high-level integration, and easy access over other technologies. Above all, using the CMOS technology it becomes possible to integrate RF circuits, analog circuits, and digital baseband circuits in a single chip, which makes an ultimate one-chip system (or system on a chip). Although many evolutions towards a CMOS RF technology have been developed at many research fields, CMOS RF technology is still infancy. This dissertation focuses on the on-chip inductor modeling and RF circuit techniques for low-power CMOS RF system-on-chip (or single-chip radio). It can be categorized in two parts. One is about on-chip inductor technology and the other is about CMOS RF circuit design methodologies. First of all, a simple wide-band on-chip inductor model that contains a parallel combination of resistance and capacitance in the substrate to model lateral substrate coupling is proposed. The proposed model shows excellent agreement with measured data over the entire frequency range of interest. The proposed model can be easily implemented in SPICE-compatible simulators to improve accuracy in circuit simulation. The inductor with an underlying deep nWell is also characterized, and its resultant performance is the excellent. To reduce silicon area, on-chip helical inductor, which the turn is expanded vertically, is characterized. We describe the design methodology for a low power and low phase-noise CMOS voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). Tank inductor design guide to achieve low phase-noise and low power consumption is presented. Our design strategy is that increasing the inductance, decreasing the active device width, and increasing the bias current which are imposed to design constraints. A 2.4-GHz fully integrated LC VCO was designed using our optimization technique and ...