Investigation of Coupling Mechanisms for Efficient High Power and Low Phase Noise E-Band Quadrature VCOs in 130nm SiGe

This article compares two SiGe Colpitts quadrature voltage-controlled oscillators (QVCO) with different coupling techniques in the low E-Band, intended to be used as signal sources for push-push frequency doublers. The first QVCO is based on a cross-coupled tail-current topology, while the second is based on a fundamental active coupling network. The cross-coupled QVCO has a center frequency of 64.3 GHz and a bandwidth of 2.5 GHz. This circuit realization provides up to 12.2 dBm output power per channel and has a power consumption of 385 mW, resulting in a dc-to-RF efficiency of 8.6%. The phase noise of this oscillator at 1 MHz offset frequency is as low as -105 dBc/Hz. The fundamentally coupled QVCO has a center frequency of 67 GHz with a bandwidth of 3.9 GHz. It provides 13.1 dBm output power per channel while consuming 410 mW of power, resulting in a dc-to-RF efficiency of 9.9%. The oscillator's phase noise at 1 MHz offset frequency is as low as -105.2 dBc/Hz. In addition to the presented circuits, this article introduces a method to measure the relative phase error of quadrature signals utilizing a vector network analyzer. This method is verified with measurements of the developed QVCOs.