Integrated VCOs for Medical Implant Transceivers

The 402-405 MHz MICS (Medical Implant Communication Service) band has recently been allocated by the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) with the potential to replace the low frequency inductive coupling techniques in implantable devices. This band was particularly chosen to provide full-integration, low-power, faster data transfer and longer communication range. This paper investigates the design of a VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator) that will be an essential building block of such wireless implantable devices operating in the MICS service band. Three different integrated quadrature VCOs that meet the requirements of the MICS standard are designed in 0.18 μm TSMC CMOS process to propose an optimum choice. Their performances in terms of power consumption, die area, linearity and phase noise are compared. The fabricated VCOs are a four stage differential ring VCO, an LC tank VCO directly loaded with a poly-phase filter and an 800 MHz LC tank VCO with a high frequency master-slave divider. All three architectures target a VCO gain of Kvco = 15 MHz/V with 3 calibration control and 2 FSK (Frequency-Shift Keying) control signals and are designed for 1.5 V supply voltage in a 0.18-μm standard CMOS process.