This article presents guidelines for designing the power supply blocks of RF oscillators. To preserve their spectral purity, the requirements on the noise and ripple of the supply voltage are firstly evaluated based on the oscillator supply pushing factor and the oscillator Figure-of-Merit (FOM). Those specifications are then employed to design and estimate the power efficiency of an analog low-dropout regulator (LDO) and a switched-capacitor DC-DC converter. As a proof of concept, a 2:1 or 3:2 switched-capacitor DC-DC converter is implemented and directly connected to our previously published 4.9-5.5 GHz LC oscillator. The converter provides a 1V supply voltage with a noise ≤0.9nV/√Hz at 1MHz and does not affect the inherent phase noise of the oscillator. The ripple amplitude of the converter is 30mV while its effect is suppressed by the spur reduction block embedded in the oscillator.@en

In this paper, we propose a new scheme to directly power a 4.9-5.6GHz LC oscillator from a recursive switched-capacitor DC-DC converter. A finite-state machine is integrated to automatically adjust the conversion ratio and switching frequency of the converter such that its DC output voltage is within ±5% of the desired 1V across input voltage range 1.3-2.2V and < 2mA load current conditions. A gate-driver circuit is embedded in each switch of the converter to guarantee constant on-resistance across PVT variations without sacrificing device reliability. Furthermore, a spur reduction block (SRB) is embedded in the oscillator to suppress the ripple induced spurs by stabilizing its tail current. Both the converter and the oscillator are implemented in 40-nm CMOS technology. The measured peak power efficiency of the converter is 87%, while its spot noise is < 1.5nV/Hz which does not degrade the phase noise of the oscillator. The SRB suppresses the spur to <-65dBc under the 30mVpp ripple of the converter.@en