High-robust relaxation oscillator with frequency synthesis feature for FM-UWB transmitters

A CMOS relaxation oscillator, with high robustness over process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations, is designed in 0.18 μm CMOS. The proposed oscillator, consisting of full-differential charge-discharge timing circuit and switched-capacitor based voltage-to-current conversion, could be expanded to a simple open-loop frequency synthesizer (FS) with output frequency digitally tuned. Experimental results show that the proposed oscillator conducts subcarrier generation for frequency-modulated ultra-wideband (FM-UWB) transmitters with triangular amplitude distortion less than 1%, and achieves frequency deviation less than 8% under PVT and phase noise of –112 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset frequency. Under oscillation frequency of 10.5 MHz, the presented design has the relative FS error less than 2% for subcarrier generation and the power dissipation of 0.6 mW from a 1.8 V supply.