A Tail-Injected Divide-by-4 SiGe HBT Injection Locked Frequency Divider

Abstract

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> This letter presents a silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) divide-by-4 injection locked frequency divider (ILFD). The ILFD is based on a single-stage voltage-controlled oscillator with active-inductor, and was fabricated in the 0.35 <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$\mu$</tex> </formula>m SiGe 3P3M BiCMOS technology. The divide-by-4 function is performed by injecting a signal to the base of the tail HBT. Measurement results show that when the supply voltage <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">${\rm V}_{\rm DD}$</tex></formula> is 3.1 V and the tuning voltage is tuned from 2.0 to 2.8 V, the divider free-running oscillation frequency is tunable from 2.12 to 2.76 GHz, and at the incident power of 0 dBm the operation range is about 1.15 GHz, from the incident frequency 8.55 to 9.7 GHz. The die area is 0.65<formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\times\,$</tex> </formula>0.435 mm<formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$^{2}$</tex> </formula>. </para>