Voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) are essential components of RF circuits used in
transmitters and receivers as sources of carrier waves with variable frequencies. This, together
with a rapid development of microelectronic circuits, led to an extensive research
on integrated implementations of the oscillator circuits. One of the known approaches
to oscillator design employs resonators with active inductors electronic circuits simulating
the behavior of passive inductors using only transistors and capacitors. Such
resonators occupy only a fraction of the silicon area necessary for a passive inductor,
and thus allow to use chip area more eectively. The downsides of the active inductor
approach include: power consumption and noise introduced by transistors.
This thesis presents a new approach to active inductor oscillator design using selfoscillating
active inductor circuits. The instability necessary to start oscillations is
provided by the use of a passive RC network rather than a power consuming external
circuit employed in the standard oscillator approach. As a result, total power consumption
of the oscillator is improved. Although, some of the active inductors with
RC circuits has been reported in the literature, there has been no attempt to utilise
this technique in wideband voltage controlled oscillator design. For this reason, the
dissertation presents a thorough investigation of self-oscillating active inductor circuits,
providing a new set of design rules and related trade-os. This includes: a complete
small signal model of the oscillator, sensitivity analysis, large signal behavior of the circuit
and phase noise model. The presented theory is conrmed by extensive simulations
of wideband CMOS VCO circuit for various temperatures and process variations. The obtained results prove that active inductor oscillator performance is obtained without
the use of standard active compensation circuits. Finally, the concept of self-oscillating
active inductor has been employed to simple and fast OOK (On-Off Keying) transmitter
showing energy eciency comparable to the state of the art implementations reported
in the literature
