A Distributed Stubs Technique to Mitigate Flicker Noise Upconversion in a mm-Wave Rotary Traveling-Wave Oscillator

A rotary traveling-wave oscillator (RTWO) has an ability to generate multiple phases at millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies while achieving low phase noise (PN). Unfortunately, due to the practically unavoidable transmission line (TL) dispersion, which causes the higher-order harmonics to travel faste...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE journal of solid-state circuits 2021-06, Vol.56 (6), p.1745-1760
Main Authors: Shehata, Mohamed Atef, Keaveney, Michael, Staszewski, Robert Bogdan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
1f noise
30 GHz
Bandwidth
CMOS
Dispersion
distributed oscillator
fifth generation (5G)
Flicker
flicker noise upconversion
Frequency conversion
fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI)
Harmonic analysis
Higher harmonics
Jitter
low phase noise (PN)
Millimeter waves
millimeter-wave (mmW or mm-Wave)
Noise
phase sensitivity function
rotary traveling-wave oscillator (RTWO)
transmission line (TL) dispersion
Transmission lines
Tuning
Upconversion
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Summary:A rotary traveling-wave oscillator (RTWO) has an ability to generate multiple phases at millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies while achieving low phase noise (PN). Unfortunately, due to the practically unavoidable transmission line (TL) dispersion, which causes the higher-order harmonics to travel faster than the fundamental, RTWOs suffer from flicker noise upconversion. In this article, we propose a "distributed stubs" technique to mitigate this mechanism in which tuning capacitors placed on the TL stubs away from the maintaining amplifiers will slow down the travel speed of higher-order harmonics relative to the fundamental, thus lowering the phase shifts due to the TL dispersion. We further provide a comprehensive analysis of the flicker noise upconversion mechanism due to the TL dispersion. The proposed 26.2-30-GHz RTWO is implemented in 22-nm fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) CMOS with eight differential phases. At 30 GHz, it achieves PN of −107.6 and −128.9 dBc/Hz at 1- and 10-MHz offsets, respectively. This translates into figures-of-merit (FoMs) of 184.2 and 185.4 dB, respectively, for a single phase. The proposed architecture consumes 20 mW from 0.8-V supply. It achieves a flicker PN corner of 180 kHz, which is an order-of-magnitude better than currently achievable by state-of-the-art mmW RTWOs.
ISSN:0018-9200
1558-173X
DOI:10.1109/JSSC.2020.3044278