A Low Power Wide-band Voltage Controlled Oscillator for Global Navigation Satellite System Receiver

This paper presents a new low power small area wide-band Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) for Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver. The VCO is separated in two discrete working regions from the characteristic of all-band GNSS signals. The power and phase noise can be optimized individually, the complexity of VCO is reduced and the area is saved. A technique of tuning curve linearization is used; The conventional VCO problem of having narrow effective tuning range of control voltage (VCTRL) is solved. A linear tuning curve in whole variation of VCTRL is kept, the Amplitude Modulation to Frequency Modulation (AM-FM) conversion is decreased, and the phase noise is allayed. The measured results show that the tuning range of frequency is 49.5%, the gain of VCO (KVCO) is constant when VCTRL varies from 0.1 to 0.9 V. Measured phase noise is lower than -120 dBc at 1 MHz offset, the entire VCO consumes 2 mA current, occupies 0.24 mm2 area. The proposed VCO is implemented in 0.13 m 1P6M process, and it is successfully applied to all-band GNSS receiver.