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This paper presents the design of a mm-wave VCO for Backhaul applications. This VCO operates between 81–86 GHz and was designed in the BiCMOS 55 nm technology. The innovation is linked to the use of a slow-wave coplanar strip (S-CPS) as a differential inductor. Thanks to high quality factor (≈ 33) of S-CPS, the phase noise and power consumption are improved. The proposed VCO is compared to the classical VCO (lumped inductor and varactor based). The S-CPS based VCO exhibits 3 dB less phase noise, and lower power consumption, with a phase noise of −111 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz offset and a power consumption of 6.84 mW. With 1.2 V supply, the tuning range reaches 7.9%, which is enough for the targeted application.

An ultra-wideband Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) is presented in this paper. The circuit achieves fast startups and stops which allow wideband pulses to be generated. In addition, the VCO allows bipolar modulations as Binary Phase Shift Keying to be implemented without the need of a shaping circuit as a mixer. The proposed VCO has been integrated on a silicon area of 0.003mm2 in a 65nm CMOS technology operating with a supply voltage of 1.2V. The oscillator output provides large differential oscillations from 2.6GHz to 12.3GHz. Measurement has demonstrated the frequency agility of the proposed VCO which covers the mandatory channels of the low (resp. high) bands centered on 4492.8MHz (resp. 7987.2MHz) defined by the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The VCO power consumption is about 3.2mW/GHz. By using Current Mode Logic (CML) gates, the power consumption can be reduced to 3.84uW only when the VCO is not running (switch off).