Low voltage low noise open loop automatic amplitude control for voltage-controlled oscillators

This paper presents a low voltage low noise open loop automatic amplitude control method for voltage-controlled oscillators (VCO's). In this method a feedback mechanism keeps the VCO at its optimum amplitude over temperature and process variations and then the loop is broken to avoid noise injection form the control circuitry to the VCO. The loop does not add extra noise to the VCO. Based on the proposed method, a low voltage low noise LC-VCO was designed for a low phase noise application in TSMC 0.18 micron RFCMOS technology. Simulations show considerable improvement in the phase noise with the application of the proposed method.