A 36–40 GHz VCO with bonding inductors for millimeter wave 5G Communication

A 36-40 GHz VCO has been presented in this paper. The VCO consist of cross-coupled transistors, output buffer and inductors realized by bonding wires. The VCO was implemented in a 65 nm CMOS technology and its frequency tuning range can fully cover the N260 band of FR2 for 5G communication which proposed by 3GPP. A novel bonding wire structure was proposed and utilized as inductor to obtain better performance compared to the on-chip inductors. Moreover, it can significantly save the silicon area and realize system in package (SiP) integration. The digital part can be realized in 28 nm CMOS technology and the RF part is implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology. Thus, the system can be optimized simultaneously. The simulated demonstrates the VCO has 4 GHz tuning range, and its phase noise is -91.8 dBc/Hz @ 1MHz when the VCO oscillate at 40 GHz. The chip size of the proposed VCO is 0.113×0.192 mm ² .