Statistical process variation analysis of a graphene FET based LC-VCO for WLAN applications

Graphene which is a single atom layer of carbon film with the interesting properties of high carrier mobility, high carrier concentration, high thermal conductivity, high velocity saturation, and reduced short channel effects, is emerging as a replacement of the ubiquitous silicon. This is particularly true for high-speed analog and radio-frequency electronics due to low Ion/Ioff ratio. In this paper, design exploration of a graphene FET (GFET) based LC-VCO is performed with wireless (WLAN) as the target application. Verilog-A based GFET modeling is performed. The model is used in design simulation, characterization, and sensitivity analysis of a cross-coupled version of an LC-VCO. In order to analyze the effects of nanoscale process variations, statistical process variation analysis of the GFET based LC-VCO is performed for selected figures of merit through exhaustive Monte Carlo simulations. Power dissipation and quality factor are also analyzed and their characteristic data are illustrated to obtain a comprehensive description of the circuit. Frequency and phase noise are observed to be within the nominal design range having standard deviation 0.06 GHz and 7.78 dBc/Hz corresponding to 2.35% and 9.03% of the mean, respectively, for the total statistical variation of the parameters.