Research On Key Techniques Of Millimeter-wave On-chip Transformer And Voltage-controlled Oscillator

Millimeter-wave technologies have been developed rapidly and widely used in recent years.As a key part of the millimeter-wave radio frequency transceiver,the millimeter-wave Voltage-Controlled Oscillator(VCO)has attracted wide attention as well.The performance of VCO has a crucial effect on the receiver and transmitter,especially the influence of its phase noise and tuning range.Millimeter-wave VCO with high performance is a hot topic now.The importance of the research on millimeter-wave VCO is first discussed in this article,then the research progress of VCO and integrated transformer is introduced,then the principles and some important performance parameters are introduced in detail.After that,some common circuit structures are presented.Finally,three proposed transformers and corresponding millimeter-wave VCOs are introduced.In this paper,the millimeter-wave VCOs are designed on Cadence virtuoso based on TSMC 65 nm technology.The proposed design can realize large tuning range and good phase noise performance.The main work and innovative points of this paper are as follows:(1)LC resonance circuit and negative resistance structure are used in the proposed VCOs.Transformers and adjustable circuit are used as the inductance part of the resonant circuit.Therefore this design can also use this circuit to adjust the resonance frequency of the oscillator,which can expand the frequency range effectively.(2)In order to achieve wider frequency tuning range and better phase noise performance,three on-chip transformers are designed using HFSS software on the basis of TSMC 65 nm technology.One of them is an octagonal spiral transformer with fixed parameters.Its quality factor ranges from 17.3 to 18.3 in its operating frequency range.The other two are rectangular transformers with adjustable inductance and quality factor,using active switches and passive on-chip transformers to tune the inductance value,and the quality factor ranges from 11.5 to 22.0 in their operating frequency range.