Abstract—This paper presents a mmW frequency generation
stage aimed at minimizing phase noise via waveform shaping and
harmonic extraction while suppressing flicker noise upconversion
via proper harmonic terminations. A second-harmonic tank
resonance is assisted by a proposed embedded decoupling
capacitor inside a transformer for shortest and well controlled
common-mode current return path. Class-F operation with thirdharmonic
boosting and extraction techniques allow maintaining
high quality factor of a 10 GHz tank at the 30 GHz frequency
generation while providing implicit divide-by-3 functionality. The
proposed 27.3-31.2 GHz oscillator is implemented in 28-nm
CMOS. It achieves phase noise of -106 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset and
figure-of-merit (FoM) of -184 dB at 27.3GHz. Its flicker phasenoise
(𝟏 𝐟𝟑) corner of 120 kHz is an order-of-magnitude better
than currently achievable at mmW.