Novel 8-Phase VCO Design using Carbon Nanotube Transistor (CNT)

This paper proposes a novel 8-phase VCO design implemented using Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistors (CNTFETs). Carbon Nanotube is a fast growing and promising technology to replace Traditional MOSFETs. Its operation principles and device structure are similar to the conventional bulk CMOS, however it shows a great power delay improvement over bulk MOSFET due to its near-ballistic CNT transport. In this paper, an eight phase VCO architecture is implemented using both 32!" CMOS and CNTFET technologies to compare the performances of the CNT implementation and CMOS implementation. The simulation results demonstrate that CNT VCO consumes less power than CMOS counterpart while reaching the same range of the working frequency and performance.