Azadmousavi Tayebeh, Ghafar-Zadeh Ebrahim
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Bonab, Bonab 55517-61167, Iran.
Biologically Inspired Sensors and Actuators (BioSA), Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada.
Micromachines (Basel). 2023 Nov 18;14(11):2118. doi: 10.3390/mi14112118.
This paper investigates an adaptive body biasing (ABB) circuit to improve the reliability and variability of a low-voltage inductor-capacitor (LC) voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). The ABB circuit provides VCO resilience to process variability and reliability variation through the threshold voltage adjustment of VCO's transistors. Analytical equations considering the body bias effect are derived for the most important relations of the VCO and then the performance is verified using the post-layout simulation results. Under a 0.16% threshold voltage shift, the sensitivity of the normalized phase noise and transconductance of the VCO with the ABB circuit compared to the constant body bias (CBB) decreases by around 8.4 times and 3.1 times, respectively. Also, the sensitivity of the normalized phase noise and transconductance of the proposed VCO under 0.16% mobility variations decreases by around 1.5 times and 1.7 times compared to the CBB, respectively. The robustness of the VCO is also examined using process variation analysis through Monte Carlo and corner case simulations. The post-layout results in the 180 nm CMOS process indicate that the proposed VCO draws a power consumption of only 398 µW from a 0.6 V supply when the VCO frequency is 2.4 GHz. It achieves a phase noise of -123.19 dBc/Hz at a 1 MHz offset and provides a figure of merit (FoM) of -194.82 dBc/Hz.
本文研究了一种自适应体偏置(ABB)电路,以提高低压电感电容(LC)压控振荡器(VCO)的可靠性和可变性。ABB电路通过调整VCO晶体管的阈值电压,为VCO提供针对工艺变化和可靠性变化的弹性。推导了考虑体偏置效应的解析方程,用于描述VCO最重要的关系,然后使用布局后仿真结果验证了性能。在阈值电压偏移0.16%的情况下,与恒定体偏置(CBB)相比,采用ABB电路的VCO的归一化相位噪声和跨导灵敏度分别降低了约8.4倍和3.1倍。此外,在迁移率变化0.16%的情况下,与CBB相比,所提出的VCO的归一化相位噪声和跨导灵敏度分别降低了约1.5倍和1.7倍。还通过蒙特卡洛和极端情况仿真,利用工艺变化分析来检验VCO的鲁棒性。180nm CMOS工艺的布局后结果表明,当VCO频率为2.4GHz时,所提出的VCO从0.6V电源汲取的功耗仅为398µW。它在1MHz偏移时实现了-123.19dBc/Hz的相位噪声,并提供了-194.82dBc/Hz的品质因数(FoM)。