Public Research Seminar by Microelectronics Thrust - Compact and High-Performance Frequency Synthesizers

Motivated by the increasing demand of high-performance communication systems-on chip, for which frequency synthesizer plays one of the most critical role, this presentation introduces several design techniques to improve the performance of frequency synthesizers in terms of size, phase noise, frequency, and power.

First, a 2.1-GHz 3rd-order inductor-less frequency synthesizer with compact size is presented. A 3rd-order cascaded phase-locked loop (PLL) architecture is proposed to achieve 40-MHz -3-dB bandwidth to reject oscillator’s phase noise and additional 24-dB rejection for 1-MHz supply-noise.

Second, a dithering-less high-resolution 60-GHz digitally-controlled oscillator (DCO) is introduced for a low-noise all digital PLL (ADPLL) with fully integrated loop filter. An exponentially-scaling C-2C switched capacitor (SC) ladder is proposed for high-frequency resolution. The 60-GHz DCO prototype measures frequency resolution of 4 Hz and operates from 54.79 to 63.16 GHz with phase noise of -90.7~-94.1 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz frequency offset.

Finally, a W-band ADPLL with a proposed split transformer as variable inductor for wide tuning range at 100GHz is presented. A dual-path SC ladder is utilized for high frequency resolution and bandwidth variation reduction. A clock-skew-sampling sigma-delta time-to-digital converter (TDC) is proposed to achieve an -87-dB/Hz in-band phase noise. With the proposed techniques, the W-band ADPLL measures 10-MHz phase noise from -106 to -110dBc/Hz from 82 to 107.6 GHz.