The Investigation and Optimisation of Phase-Induced Amplitude Attenuation in the Injection-Locked Ring Oscillators-Based Receiver

Abstract

In this paper, the injection-locked oscillator (ILO)-based receiver is investigated. The key design considerations of the ILO including the phase difference between the input and output signals and its impact on the ILO-based receiver are analysed in detail. Different strategies for both the narrow and wide-band applications are discussed and simulated. As a design example, a 2.4 GHz ILO-based receiver is implemented using a standard 40 nm CMOS technology, where a three-stage inverter-based ILO is optimised to maintain a good balance among working range, sensitivity and power consumption, etc. Measurement results show that the proposed receiver is able to demodulate an input signal at a 2.4 GHz carrier frequency with the data rate up to 1 Mbps while consuming $${<}300\, \upmu \hbox {W}$$<300μW power. It is suitable for short-range communication system such as chip-scale data link.