Ultra Wide-Band Inductive Peaking VCO with Cascode Noise Reduction

A ring-based inductive peaking VCO with a novel noise reduction technique is reported in this paper. An extra cascode transistor is used to bias the switching transistor into the deep triode region where the noise performance is better than that in the saturation region. A differential structure with a full custom symmetrical inductor demonstrates the benefits of the concept. The highest operational frequency reached was 39GHz with a tuning range of more than 4 octaves. The figure of merit (≈189) indicates that better overall combination of frequency and phase noise is obtained when compared with previous work.