Digitally Controlled Oscillator Frequency Research Articles

Spectral Breathing and Its Mitigation in Digital Fractional-N PLLs

Although digital phase-locked loops (PLLs) offer several advantages over their analog counterparts, they suffer from a major disadvantage that is rarely mentioned in published articles. The disadvantage, known as spectral breathing, is caused by component mismatches among the frequency control elements within a PLL’s digitally controlled oscillator (DCO). The mismatches introduce DCO frequency modulation nonlinearity which fluctuates and, therefore, causes erratic variations in the PLL’s measured phase noise spectrum as the DCO’s free-running frequency drifts. The phenomenon is called spectral breathing because the measured phase noise spectrum tends to slowly swell and contract over time as if taking breaths of air. During these breaths, the PLL’s phase noise often becomes severely degraded. This article presents an experimental demonstration of the spectral breathing phenomenon and its solution in a digital fractional- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula> PLL. The demonstrated solution is a multi-rate dynamic element matching technique and a mismatch-noise cancellation technique that together eliminate spectral breathing.

An Ultra-Low Power, Adaptive All-Digital Frequency-Locked Loop With Gain Estimation and Constant Current DCO

In this paper, an ultra-low power, adaptive all-digital integer frequency-locked loop (FLL) with gain estimation and constant current digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) for Bluetooth low energy (BLE) transceiver in Internet-of-Things (IoT) is presented. For locking DCO frequency closest to the target channel, it adaptively controls capacitor banks with binary algorithm. With decrease in frequency resolution, DCO clock counts for each capacitor bank bit evaluation dynamically increases with the proposed technique for accurate frequency tracking. For compensating PVT variations and finding the BLE frequency deviation, the configurable digital DCO gain estimation is incorporated. The low power and constant current DCO operates in sub-threshold region and its power consumption is minimized by g <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">m</sub> /I <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">D</sub> methodology optimization, constant current source for limiting current in DCO core through adaptive low-dropout regulator (LDO) and lowering the supply voltage. The proposed design is integrated in an ADPLL for BLE transceiver and it is fabricated with 1P6M TSMC 55 nm CMOS technology. The all-digital adaptive FLL is fully synthesizable and its area is 1800 μm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> with 1.233 K gate count. The RMS current consumption is 103.32 μA from 1 V voltage supply with 103.32 μW power requirement. The experimental results reveal, DCO draws 480 μA current from 0.55 V supply voltage at center frequency. It has frequency resolution of 4.8 kHz. The oscillator PN, FOM and FOMT at 1-MHz offset frequency from 2.44 GHz carrier frequency are -122.85 dBc/Hz, 196.38 dBc/Hz and 208.19 dBc/Hz, respectively.

A 0.45-to-1.8 GHz synthesized injection-locked bang-bang phase locked loop with fine frequency tuning circuits

This paper proposes a synthesized injection-locked bang-bang phased-locked loop (SILBBPLL) with high digital controlled oscillator (DCO) frequency resolution. The SILBBPLL is expressed with hardware description language and automatically placed & routed (APR) by using standard digital circuit design flow. As the mismatch issues of the circuits are not considered carefully during the APR design flow, the phase noise performance is severely deteriorated. We adopt pulse injection locking technique to improve the phase noise performance. The DCO frequency resolution is critical for reducing the reference spur in a digital injection-locked PLL. Therefore, we propose novel frequency tuning circuits to increase the DCO frequency resolution so that the reference spurs are reduced. The frequency tuning circuits consist of a standard cell based high-linearity output feedback DAC (OFDAC) and two custom varactors. The OFDAC is used to tune the frequency of the DCO with the custom varactor precisely. The custom varactor is firstly designed, added into the standard cell library, and APR with the standard cells. The SILBBPLL chip with a core area of 0.008 mm2 is implemented in 65 nm CMOS process. When operating at 1.8 GHz, the measured results show that the root-mean-square (RMS) jitter integrated from 10 kHz to 100 MHz is 1.1 ps, and the power consumption is 1.5 mW with a 0.8-V supply. The proposed SILBBPLL achieves a figure-of-merit (FoM) of −237.4 dB and a reference spur of −50.9 dBc.

A low-jitter all-digital PLL with high-linearity DCO

This paper describes a low-jitter all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) with a high-linearity digitally controlled oscillator (DCO). The proposed DCO consists of a three-stage differential ring oscillator with a coarse-tune stage, a fine-tune stage, and process voltage temperature (PVT) variation compensation. The coarse-tune stage comprises tri-inverters controlled using the binary-weighted method and has high linearity and monotonicity. The fine-tune stage consists of six groups of NMOS capacitors to achieve a high timing resolution. Moreover, the range of the DCO frequency can be varied according to the PVT variations s to match the desired frequency range of the ADPLL. The proposed ADPLL was implemented in a 0.18-µm standard CMOS process with a supply voltage of 1.8 V. The experimental results indicated that the proposed DCO can cover the frequency range of 202–518 MHz under different PVT variations. The output frequency range of the proposed ADPLL with a programmable divider was 402–417 MHz, and its division range was 134–139. The ADPLL is suitable for MedRadio band applications. At 411 MHz, the power consumption was 13 mW, rms jitter was 5.98 ps (0.25% of the output period), and active die area was 0.27 mm2.

Low supply voltage and multiphase all‐digital crystal‐less clock generator

A multiphase all-digital crystal-less clock generator (CLCG) with an interpolating digital controlled oscillator (DCO) that achieves an operating frequency of 500 MHz with 10-phase outputs is proposed. The CLCG adopts a specific temperature coefficient of a time-to-digital convertor (TDC) to create a positive or negative temperature coefficient and compensates for the DCO frequency drift. A time amplifier (TA) can extend the timing resolution of the TDC and reduce the effects of process variations in order to tune the TA gains. The frequency compensator adopts the frequency difference between the ring oscillator and DCO to reduce the frequency drift. The frequency accuracy is 69 ppm/°C from - 20 to 80°C. The root mean square jitter and output phase noise are 3.86 ps and - 100.36 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz, respectively. The core area of the test chip is 350 × 420 μm 2 in a 65-nm CMOS process. At a supply voltage of 0.6 V, the power consumption is 1.8 mW for the 5 Gb/s clocking system.

A 14-nm 0.14-psrmsFractional-N Digital PLL With a 0.2-ps Resolution ADC-Assisted Coarse/Fine-Conversion Chopping TDC and TDC Nonlinearity Calibration

A digital fractional-N phase-locked loop (PLL) is presented. It achieves 137- and 142-fs rms jitter integrating from 10 kHz to 10 MHz and from 1 kHz to 10 MHz, respectively. With a frequency multiplication ratio of 207.0019231 [digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) frequency is 50 kHz away from an integer multiple of the 26-MHz reference clock], a −78.6-dBc fractional spur is achieved for an output clock that runs at half of the DCO frequency. Time-to-digital converter (TDC) chopping technique, TDC fine conversion through successive approximation register analog-to-digital converters (SARADCs), and TDC nonlinearity calibration improve integrated phase noise and fractional spurs. This design meets the performance requirement of the 256-QAM <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4 \times 4$ </tex-math></inline-formula> MIMO LTE standard in 5-GHz ISM band and also the 5G cellular 64-QAM standard in 28-GHz band. This work, implemented in a 14-nm fin-shaped field effect transistor (FinFET) CMOS process, is integrated to a cellular RF integrated circuit supporting advanced carrier aggregation operation. This PLL draws 13.4 mW and occupies 0.257 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .

A 0.2–1.45-GHz Subsampling Fractional- $N$ Digital MDLL With Zero-Offset Aperture PD-Based Spur Cancellation and In Situ Static Phase Offset Detection

A digital fractional-N subsampling multiplying delay-locked loop is proposed in this paper. A zero phase-offset latch-based aperture phase detector is introduced in a reference spur cancellation loop to precisely cancel any static phase offset (SPO) between the injected reference and the digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) phases. An in situ detection scheme is employed to directly measure this phase offset accurately by obviating the requirement of a high-speed off-chip measurement setup. Moreover, a mathematical expression is derived for the calculation of reference spur generated from a given SPO. A uniformly distributed switched capacitor-based DCO frequency tuning achieves highly linear gain. The chip prototype is fabricated in a 1.2-V supply, 65-nm LP CMOS technology and covers an output frequency range of 0.2-1.45 GHz while occupying a core area of 0.054 mm 2 . Measured phase noise at 1.4175 GHz is -95 dBc/Hz at 100-kHz offset, which is 9 dB lower than in phase-locked loop mode of operation.

A Low-Jitter Fast-Locked All-Digital Phase-Locked Loop With Phase–Frequency-Error Compensation

The previous fast-locked all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) usually suffers from large timing jitter due to the steep frequency transfer curve of its digitally controlled oscillator (DCO). This paper presents an ADPLL that possesses a coarse frequency selection function. All DCO frequency transfer curves of the ADPLL have gentle slopes. The ADPLL selects one transfer curve before acquisition. To fulfill the fast-acquisition requirement, the proposed ADPLL employs the phase–frequency-error compensation technique. In the acquisition mode, the phase-error compensator resolves the problem of phase-error accumulation. Meanwhile, the frequency-error compensator predicts a proper control code by calculating the cycle time difference between the reference clock and the derived signal fed back from the DCO. Therefore, the proposed ADPLL can compensate for the phase and the frequency errors simultaneously. The experimental results show that the proposed ADPLL possesses a fine-tuning acquisition within 5 reference clock cycles. After acquisition, the code updates in a fractional manner in the tracking mode to enhance the tracking jitter performance. The ADPLL output frequency ranges from 860 MHz to 1 GHz. The measured rms jitter is 1.31 ps at 1-GHz frequency.

Digital PLL‐based frequency synthesis: effect of loop filter shape on required DCO frequency resolution

In digital phase-locked loops (PLLs), the finite resolution of digital representation (quantisation) could pose problems, including jitter peaking and limit-cycle behaviour; both could ruin the frequency stability of a PLL. The resolution of the digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) in the PLL is limited by the smallest dimension available in a given process technology. Currently, one resorts to exhaustive time-domain simulations to ensure correct operation of a PLL. Using a behavioural model of a PLL as verification, how to choose the DCO resolution without resorting to time-domain simulations is investigated. The conditions on signal statistics for correct behaviour are repeated and the analysis to estimate the required resolution is provided. As it turns out, the root-mean-square value of the frequency deviation - neglecting quantisation - is the coarsest possible DCO resolution. One can estimate this value accurately by the integration of its power-spectral density, derived from the well-known phase-domain model of a PLL.

A 12 mW ADPLL Based G/FSK Transmitter for Smart Utility Network in 0.18 ㎛ CMOS

This paper presents low power frequency shift keying (FSK) transmitter using all digital PLL (ADPLL) for smart utility network (SUN). In order to operate at low-power and to integrate a small die area, the ADPLL is adopted in transmitter. The phase noise of the ADPLL is improved by using a fine resolution time to digital converter (TDC) and digitally controlled oscillator (DCO). The FSK transmitter is implemented in 0.18㎛ 1-poly 6-metal CMOS technology. The die area of the transmitter including ADPLL is 3.5 ㎟. The power consumption of the ADPLL is 12.43 ㎽. And, the power consumptions of the transmitter are 35.36 ㎽ and 65.57 ㎽ when the output power levels are -1.6 ㏈m and +12 ㏈m, respectively. Both of them are supplied by 1.8 V voltage source. The frequency resolution of the TDC is 2.7 ㎰. The effective DCO frequency resolution with the differential MOS varactor and sigma-delta modulator is 2.5 ㎐. The phase noise of the ADPLL output at 7.8㎓ is -121.17 ㏈c/㎐ with a 1㎒ offset.

Low power FSK transmitter using all-digital PLL for IEEE 802.15.4g application

This paper presents low power frequency shift keying (FSK) transmitter using all-digital pll (ADPLL) for IEEE 802.15.4g application. In order to operate at low-power and to integrate a small die area, the ADPLL is adopted in transmitter. The phase noise of the ADPLL is improved by using a fine resolution time to digital converter (TDC) and digitally controlled oscillator (DCO). The resolution of the proposed TDC is improved by using a phase-interpolator, which divides the inverter delay time and the time amplifier, which amplifies the time difference between the reference frequency and the DCO clock. The phase noise of the proposed ADPLL is also improved by using a fine resolution DCO with an active capacitor. To cover the wide tuning range and to operate at a low-power, a two-step coarse tuning scheme with a metal insulator metal capacitor and an active inductor is used. The FSK transmitter is implemented in 0.18 μm 1-poly 6-metal CMOS technology. The die area of the transmitter including ADPLL is 2.2 mm2. The power consumption of the ADPLL and transmitter is 12.43 and 22.7 mW when the output power level of the transmitter is ?1.6 dBm at 1.8 V supply voltage, respectively. The frequency resolution of the TDC is 1.25 ps. The effective DCO frequency resolution with the active capacitance and sigma-delta modulator is 2.5 Hz. The phase noise of the ADPLL output at 1.83 GHz is ?121.5 dBc/Hz with a 1 MHz offset.

A 0.0052 mm2 COMPACT DIGITAL PLL IN 65 nm CMOS

A novel structure of digital phase locked loop (PLL) is presented in this paper. It uses digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) to generate the clock. At the beginning of each reference clock cycle, the DCO is fully reset and restarts to oscillate to prevent the long term jitter accumulation and increase the loop stability. It uses three types of digital delay control methods, including delay cell number adjust, delay cell load adjust and in cycle load adjust to digitally control the DCO output clock frequency, in order to get wider frequency range and smaller jitter. This digital PLL uses NAND gate as the basic delay cell of ring oscillator, which can completely reset DCO in a very short time. It uses binary search to achieve fast lock and uses shift chain to get better input clock jitter tolerance. This digital PLL has been silicon validated in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 65 nm Generic process. Its chip area is only 0.0052 mm2. In typical condition, DCO's frequency has a wide range between 550 MHz and 2.45 GHz. Its total power is around 1.4 mW when DCO's frequency is 1.8 GHz. This PLL can be locked very fast in 25 divided reference clock cycles, and its output clock jitter is around 18 ps.

A TDC-Less 7 mW 2.5 Gb/s Digital CDR With Linear Loop Dynamics and Offset-Free Data Recovery

A digital clock and data recovery circuit (CDR) employs hybrid analog/digital phase detection to achieve linear loop dynamics and to eliminate the nonlinearity and quantization error of a bang-bang phase detector. The proposed architecture achieves constant jitter transfer bandwidth independent of input data jitter and reduces the sensitivity to digitally-controlled oscillator's frequency quantization error and consecutive identical digits. The hybrid phase detection scheme also helps decouple jitter generation from jitter transfer characteristics of the CDR. The proto-type digital CDR fabricated in 0.13 μm CMOS technology achieves error-free operation (BER <; 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-12</sup> ) for PRBS data sequences ranging from 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">7</sup> - 1 to 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">31</sup> -1 sequence lengths over 0.5 Gb/s to 3.2 Gb/s data rates. At 2.5 Gb/s, the CDR consumes 7 mW power from a single 1.2 V supply and the recovered clock jitter is 5.7 ps rms.

Low-Power, All Digital Phase-Locked Loop with a Wide-Range, High Resolution TDC

In this paper, we propose a low-power all-digital phase- locked loop (ADPLL) with a wide input range and a high resolution time-to-digital converter (TDC). The resolution of the proposed TDC is improved by using a phase-interpolator and the time amplifier. The phase noise of the proposed ADPLL is improved by using a fine resolution digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) with an active inductor. In order to control the frequency of the DCO, the transconductance of the active inductor is tuned digitally. The die area of the ADPLL is 0.8 mm2 using 0.13 µm CMOS technology. The frequency resolution of the TDC is 1 ps. The DCO tuning range is 58% at 2.4 GHz and the effective DCO frequency resolution is 0.14 kHz. The phase noise of the ADPLL output at 2.4 GHz is -120.5 dBc/Hz with a 1 MHz offset. The total power consumption of the ADPLL is 12 mW from a 1.2 V supply voltage.

High Frequency Resolution DCO with Mismatched Capacitor Pairs

The LC-based Digitally Controlled Oscillator (DCO) is one of the most important components of all digital phase locked loops. The performance of the loops is significantly determined by the DCO's frequency resolution. In order to enhance the frequency resolution, we propose a mismatched capacitor pairs based digitally controlled switched capacitance array, which dramatically reduces the minimum switched varactor capacitance. Furthermore, we implement a DCO based on our proposal in SMIC 0.18µm and conduct simulation in Spectre. The simulation results show that the frequency resolution is enhanced compared with the existing methods.

A Digital Intensive Fractional-N PLL and All-Digital Self-Calibration Schemes

A digital intensive PLL featuring a digital filter in parallel with an analog feed-forward path and a digital controlled oscillator (DCO) is presented. Digital loop filter replaces analog passive filter to reduce chip area and associated gate-leakage in advanced process. It also allows the PLL loop gain and DCO gain to be digitally calibrated to within 100 ppm within 50 mus. Such fine frequency resolution enables the PLL to accurately compensate for the loop parameter variation due to process, voltage and temperature (PVT). The analog feed-forward path is insensitive to quantization error of fractional-N divider and DCO nonlinearity. Direct modulating the DCO frequency and phase through the analog feed-forward path, and compensating the modulating signal digitally for the DCO gain variation are demonstrated. At 3.6 GHz all fractional spurs are under - 75 dBc. The phase noise at 400 kHz and 3 MHz are -115.6 dBc/Hz and -134.9 dBc/Hz, respectively. The chip is fabricated in a 0.13 mu m CMOS process, and occupies an active area of 0.85 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> and draws 40 mA from a 1.5 V supply including all auxiliary circuitry.