A Complementary-Coupled CMOS LC Quadrature Oscillator

Abstract

A novel CMOS LC quadrature oscillator (QO) which adopts complementary-coupling circuitry has been proposed. The performance improvement in I/Q phase error and phase noise of the proposed QO, is explained in comparison with conventional QOs. The proposed QO is implemented in 0.18 mu m CMOS technology along with conventional QOs. The measurement result of the proposed QO shows -133.5 dBc/Hz of phase noise at 1 MHz offset and 0.6 degrees I/Q phase difference, while oscillating at 1.77 GHz. The proposed QO shows more than 6.5 dB phase noise improvement compared to that of the conventional QOs over the offset frequency range of 10 K-1 MHz, while dissipating 4 mA from 1.4 V supply.