IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2016 - 81

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Carlo Samori

Understanding Phase
Noise in LC VCOs
A key problem in RF integrated circuits

T

he design of low-phase-noise inductorcapacitor voltage-controlled oscillators (LC VCOs) has been one of the most
important topics in the field of radio frequency (RF) integrated circuits in last 20
years. A huge number of IEEE papers have been devoted
to this subject, which is quite a unique circumstance for
a circuit that typically embeds from three (sometimes
two) to five transistors. The reasons for this widespread
interest are well known, i.e., the phase noise of VCOs is
one major obstacle encountered during the design of RF
transceivers, and the power dissipated to meet the noise
specs is often a nonnegligible portion of the total budget.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2016.2573979
Date of publication: 14 November 2016

1943-0582/16©2016IEEE

A second reason is the intrinsic time-variant nature (often
also nonlinear) of these circuits, which makes their analysis very difficult.
The efforts made in the last two decades have substantially deepened the understanding of the matter; yet the
design and analysis of VCOs is an important research subject today. It is, therefore, important to point out what has
been understood thus far. Of course, it is impossible to
summarize 20 years of findings in a short article; therefore, only a selection of the main results is presented
here. In particular, the discussion is focused on so-called
white phase noise in differential current-biased metal-
oxide-semiconductor (MOS) LC VCOs that, until today,
have achieved the best phase noise versus power performance. Other important issues, such as the flicker noise
impact and voltage-biased VCOs ring oscillators, are
not discussed. Above all, the viewpoint of the designer

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2016

IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2016 - Cover1
IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2016 - Cover2
IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2016 - 1
IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2016 - 2
IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2016 - 3
IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2016 - 4
IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2016 - 5
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IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2016 - Cover3
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