A 2 mW, 55.8-GHz CMOS injection-locked frequency divider with 7.1-GHz locking range

Abstract

A low-power and wide-locking-range 55.8-GHz (V-band) injection-locked frequency-divider (ILFD) using standard 0.13 mum CMOS technology is reported. To enhance locking range, a shunt inductor was introduced in the source node of the cross-coupled pair to maximize the equivalent load impedance of the tail transistor, i.e. to maximize the internal power, over the frequency band of interest. In addition, the inductors and capacitors of the LC-tank were implemented by low-Q micro-stripline inductors and high-Q varactors, respectively, to further improve the locking range of the ILFD. The result shows that a wide-locking-range of 7.1 GHz (from 48.7 GHz to 55.8 GHz, 13.6%) was achieved. The power consumption of the ILFD is only 2 mW from a 1.1 V power supply. The chip area was only 0.66times0.48 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> excluding the test pads.