A Low Power Active-Passive Dual Gm-Boosted W-Band Oscillator for Wireless Network-on-Chip Applications

A low power active-passive dual Gm-boosted W-band oscillator is proposed leveraging a passive and active dual boosting technique to reduce power consumption and phase noise. An auxiliary common source amplifier is introduced between the gate and drain nodes of the oscillator’s core transistors to provide higher-than-unity small-signal gain between the drain and gate of the oscillator’s core transistors. Additionally, passive transformer coupling is introduced between the auxiliary amplifier’s load inductor and the oscillator’s resonant tank inductor, increasing the effective transconductance with no additional power consumption. The resulting oscillator is extremely compact and exhibits low phase noise under very small power consumption. The oscillator consumes an active area of only 0.025 mm² and achieves a measured phase-noise of -105.5 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz offset and an FoM of -177.2 dB.