Low-Power Voltage Controlled Oscillators (VCO) Based on Sefl-Biased CNTFETs

A low-power Current-Starved Voltage-Controlled Oscillator (CSVCO) circuit has been presented here. Theproposed structure is based on the hybrid circuit of the Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistor (CNTFET) and lowpower32 nm CMOS transistors. A modified Schmitt trigger is applied for the comparator part of the circuit resulting inat least one order of magnitude mitigation in the power consumption with respect to previously presented work. Themodified Schmitt trigger topology exploit self-biased transistor technique to lower the transistors leakage current [1].The effect of design and characteristics parameters such as Gate oxide thickness, inter-CNT pitch and chirality on thepower dissipation and the oscillation frequency is also studied here. The results also demonstrate a micro-watt rangepower dissipation for several values of these parameters. In addition to the dissipation power lowering, the proposedtopology also show enhanced oscillation frequency values in some design parameters with respect to work presented in [2].

Keywords:

Current-Starved Voltage Controlled Oscillators , Carbon Nanotube FET , Schmitt trigger