A Silicon-Proven Wide-Range Voltage Controlled Oscillator Designed Using Open-Source CMOS 130nm PDK

Voltage-controlled oscillators (VCO) designs are tailored to specific CMOS processes in which they are highly dependent on, therefore chip-validated VCO designs are essential in evaluating VCO design. This paper presents a wide-range VCO that is designed using the open-source CMOS 130 nm Process Design Kit from Skywater, and open-source CAD tools for schematic entry, physical layout, and verification. The VCO design is included in a test-chip fabricated through the Tinytapeout community-driven shuttle service. Experimental results show that the VCO provides a frequency range between 2 kHz to 2.1 MHz range, with a VCO gain between 0.79-1.90 MHz/V, observable through a shared die tapeout that inherently has resistive and capacitive loading overhead.