This work describes the design and the fabrication of traveling wave voltage controlled oscillator in CMOS technology. It has been shown that the RTW-VCO combines the advantages of the LC oscillator and the ring oscillator without their respective drawbacks. The topology allows the generation of more than one signal phase. It is based on a resonator architecture making low power consumption combined with good spectral purity possible. To describe the operation of the new oscillator a review of the distributed amplifier has been done from which the structure is derived. The quality factor of the strip-line resonator has been defined as well as its cutoff frequency. These parameters influence the consumption as well as the phase noise. An analytical phase noise equation has been developed which predicts the influence of parameter variation like the number of gain stages or the loaded quality factor. It has been shown that the most distributed the structure was, the best optimization for phase noise and consumption. Two circuits were designed, fabricated and tested in 0.13 micro meter gate-length CMOS technology. They are capable of providing oscillation frequencies of respectively 18GHz and 36GHz while providing 5% of tuneability. These were the first RTW-VCO circuits at such high frequencies. The feasability on standard process of fabrication has been proved.    «

This work describes the design and the fabrication of traveling wave voltage controlled oscillator in CMOS technology. It has been shown that the RTW-VCO combines the advantages of the LC oscillator and the ring oscillator without their respective drawbacks. The topology allows the generation of more than one signal phase. It is based on a resonator architecture making low power consumption combined with good spectral purity possible. To describe the operation of the new oscillator a review of t...    »