A mm-Wave 40 nm CMOS Subharmonically Injection-Locked QVCO with Lock Detection
 
A mm-Wave 40 nm CMOS Subharmonically Injection-Locked QVCO with Lock Detection ■
 
Giovanni Mangraviti, Giovanni Mangraviti, Giovanni Mangraviti, Bertrand Parvais, Bertrand Parvais, Bertrand Parvais, Qixian Shi, Qixian Shi, Qixian Shi, Vojkan Vidojkovic, Vojkan Vidojkovic, Vojkan Vidojkovic, Michael Libois, Michael Libois, Michael Libois, Gerd Vandersteen, Gerd Vandersteen, Gerd Vandersteen, Piet Wambacq, Piet Wambacq, Piet Wambacq
 
Abstract ■

This paper demonstrates a 40 nm CMOS mm-wave subharmonically injection-locked QVCO with a lock detection mechanism. The locking range is more than 2 GHz over the 55-63 GHz tuning range. An envelope detector simplifies the calibration of the QVCO. In addition, the lock detector, based on passive mixing, detects the lock condition simply by a change in the DC operating point. The large locking range, the large tunability and the combination of envelope detector and lock detector offer a simple approach for robust mm-wave frequency synthesis based on subharmonic injection locking.