Design Of A Ka Band Injection-locked Voltage-controlled Oscillator Pair With Tunable Phase Outputs Using CMOS Technology

In order to achieve the high data rate and low latency features in 5G wireless communication,phased array or beam forming is introduced in the transceiver architecture for 5G,satisfying the high bandwidth communication need of a great number of users simultaneously by using spatial multiplexing.This trend calls for phase shift circuits of high performances.In this dissertation,a circuit outputting tunable phases targeting Ka band which is a candidate frequency band for 5G is designed using CMOS technology.The circuit utilizes the injection-locked LC cross-coupled oscillator structure to achieve continuous phase tuning according to the analog control voltage.This helps to achieve both high phase tuning accuracy and better phase noise performance.Due to the requirement of large silicon area occupied by on-chip passive devices,this work is intended to optimize for smaller chip size and lower power while maintaining the relatively good performances of injection-locked oscillators.Two completely identical voltage-controlled oscillators are placed on a single chip to achieve higher integration in this dissertation.The signal of the source oscillator is injected into the target oscillator using multiple stages of inverters so that a pair of output signals of selected frequency and phase difference within the tuning range are generated by tuning the control voltages of the two oscillators to achieve certain injection lock condition.Thus oscillatory signal outputs with tunable phase difference can be achieved on a single chip.The test chip using GSMC 130nm CMOS technology had a 185.4 degree tuning range between 28.97 to 31.18GHz with a core area of 0.0385 mm~2.The tuning accuracy wass 1.2°/m V and the power consumption was 18.2m W.