A Small Area 5GHz LC VCO with an On-Chip Solenoid Inductor using a 0.13 μm Digital CMOS Technology

This paper presents a small area LC VCO with an on-chip solenoid inductor using 0.13?m digital CMOS technology. This on-chip solenoid inductor is vertically built by metal and via layers with a horizontal occupation which gives the advantages of small area due to 3-D nature compared to a spiral inductor. Based on 3-D EM simulation and analysis, the unified equivalent model for a solenoid inductor is proposed so that it could be adapted for LC Voltage controlled oscillator in the digital standard CMOS process. The designed LC VCO has the occupation area as 0.013 mm2?and the frequency tuning range as 1GHz. The measured phase noise of VCO was measured as -105.25dBc/Hz at a 1MHz offset with the power consumption of 13.2mW with total area of 0.028mm2.