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In this letter, a dual-mode rotary traveling-wave oscillator (RTWO) is proposed to achieve wide operation bandwidth and multiple phases. Two twisted differential transmission lines are coupled together to form the dual-mode traveling-wave resonator. Sixteen pairs of back-to-back inverters and capacitors are connected to the resonators to introduce the multicore multi-phase operation. The mode switches are used to control the coupling direction and select the desired mode without degrading the quality factor. Verified in a 40-nm CMOS process, the proposed dual-mode RTWO exhibits a dual-mode frequency range from 19.1 to 25.5 GHz with the core size of 0.08 mm $^{\textbf {2}}$. The measured 10-MHz phase noise at 25.30 and 22.12 GHz is −129.6 and −131.5 dBc/Hz, respectively. The best FoM and FoMT are 186.2 and 195.4 dBc/Hz, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a quad-core millimeter-wave (mm-wave) oscillator using E-M mixed-coupling resonance boosting. The mixed-coupling resonator is introduced to generate four reconfigurable resonances. The magnetic coupling and electric coupling are achieved by the symmetrically coupled transformer and coupling capacitor, respectively. A 2-D mode switch array is introduced to couple the quad-core and achieve the quad-mode switching without degrading the performance of the selected mode. Therefore, the reduction of phase noise and the extension of tuning range are achieved simultaneously. Meanwhile, the digitally controlled tail-resistor array is used to optimize the flicker noise up-conversion in wideband. Prototyped in 40-nm CMOS, the proposed oscillator exhibits a 73.2% tuning range from 18.6 to 40.1 GHz. The best phase noise at 1-MHz offset is −108.5 dBc/Hz, corresponding to an figure-of-merit (FoM) of 184.4 dBc/Hz and FoMT of 201.7 dBc/Hz. The variation range of FoM over the whole frequency range is 3 dB. The 1/ƒ3 phase noise corner is 220–620 kHz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter proposes a low-phase-noise high-efficiency power oscillator with digitally controlled output power and frequency. The transformer-based matching network resonator is implemented to balance the quality factor and matching efficiency. The active core and the transformer are jointly optimized to achieve the required output power while achieving the low phase noise and high power efficiency. Besides, the digitally controlled cross-coupled pair array is utilized to tune the output power. To verify the mechanism mentioned above, the power oscillator is fabricated using conventional 40-nm CMOS technology with an active area of 0.19 mm2. The proposed power oscillator exhibits a 21.7% tuning range from 2.30 to 2.86 GHz. The maximum output power is 4.5 dBm with a peak system efficiency of 25.1%. Meanwhile, the measured phase noise at a 3-MHz offset is −140.36 dBc/Hz at 2.79 GHz. The corresponding figure of merit (FoM) is 189.2 dBc/Hz, and FoMT is 196 dBc/Hz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]