A switched-capacitor mm-wave VCO in 65 nm digital CMOS

A 34–40 GHz VCO fabricated in 65 nm digital CMOS technology is demonstrated in this paper. The VCO uses a combination of switched capacitors and varactors for tuning and has a maximum Kvco of 240 MHz/V. It exhibits a phase noise of better than −98 dBc/Hz @ 1-MHz offset across the band while consuming 12 mA from a 1.2-V supply, an FOM T of −182.1 dBc/Hz. A cascode buffer following the VCO consumes 11 mA to deliver 0 dBm LO signal to a 50Ω load.