Design of an Injection-Locked Oscillator for mm-Wave Applications in 40-nm CMOS
Journal
IEEE Microwave and Wireless Technology Letters
Start Page
1
End Page
4
ISSN
2771-9588
2771-957X
Date Issued
2026-02-19
Author(s)
Abstract
This letter presents a millimeter-Wave (mm-Wave) injection-locked oscillator (ILO) that integrates a pregenerator with a triple-pushed, three-stage ring oscillator (RO). The circuit is fabricated in 40-nm CMOS process without employing the ultrathick metal (UTM). Owing to the triple-pushed technique, the proposed ILO achieves mm-Wave operation without being constrained by process limitations. A systematic design methodology is also introduced. The fabricated ILO operates from 228 to 238.5 GHz, with power consumption of 47.7 mW. Under injection locking, the phase noise (PN) reaches −112.5 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset and −121.7 dBc/Hz at 10-MHz offset, resulting in a figure-of-merit (FoM) of −203.1 dBc/Hz. These results demonstrate that the proposed ILO achieves good performance even without the use of UTM in the fabrication process.
Subjects
Frequency multiplier (FM)
injection-locked (IL)
injection-locked oscillator (ILO)
millimeter-Wave (mm-Wave)
six-generation (6G) communication
subterahertz (sub-THz)
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Type
journal article