Design and Implementation of Low Jitter Clock Generators in Communication and Aerospace System

Abstract

The high demands on data processing and bandwidth in wireless/wireline communication and aerospace systems have been pushing forward circuit design techniques to their limitations to obtain maximum performances with respect to high operating frequency, low noise, small area, and low power consumption. Clock generators are essential components in numerous circuits, for instance, frequency synthesizers for high speed transceivers, clock sources for microprocessors, noise suppressed zero-delay buffers in system-on-chips (SOCs), and clock and data recovery (CDR) systems. Furthermore, clock generators are required to provide low jitter and high precision clocks in fully integrated image reject receivers and an ultra-wide tunability in time-interleaved applications. We explore several circuit design techniques and implementations of low jitter clock generator in this thesis. Firstly, a low jitter and wide range digital phase-locked loop (DPLL) operating 8 ~ 16 GHz is illustrated using a dual path digital loop filter (DLF). In order to mitigate the phase jitter in the phase detector (PD), we implement the separate loop filter and the output is not affected by the proportional path. For the stable operation, a 4 ~ 8 GHz linear phase interpolator (PI) is implemented in the proportional path. In addition, we design a low phase noise digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) using inductive tuning technique based on switched mutual coupling for wide operating range. The proposed DPLL implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology shows an outstanding figure-of-merit (FOM) over other state-of-art DPLLs in term of root mean square (RMS) and deterministic jitter (DJ). Secondly, we discuss a radiation-hardened-by-design (RHBD) PLL using a feedback voltage-controlled oscillator (FBVCO) in order to reduce DJ due to the radiation attack on the control voltage. Different from a conventional open loop VCO, the proposed FBVCO has a negative control loop and is composed of an open loop VCO, an integrator and a switched-capacitor resistor. Since the input to output of the FBVCO has a low-pass characteristic, any disturbance on the control voltage should be filtered and cannot affect the output phase. We are able to reduce the output frequency variation approximately 75% compared to the conventional PLL when the radiation pulse strikes on the control voltage. The proposed RHBD PLL is implemented in 130 nm and consumes 6.2 mW at 400 MHz operating frequency. Thirdly, a novel adaptive-bandwidth PLL is illustrated to optimize the jitter performance in a wide operating frequency range. We achieve a constant ratio of bandwidth and reference frequency with a closed loop VCO and an overdamping system with a charge pump (CP) current proportional to the VCO frequency for the adaptive-bandwidth technique. The proposed adaptive-bandwidth PLL presents 0.6% RMS jitter over the entire frequency range from 320 MHz to 2.56 GHz, which is 70% smaller than the conventional fixed-bandwidth PLL. Finally, we have developed a new feedback DCO to achieve a linear gain of DCO so that the DPLL can provide stability and a wide operating range in different process variations. Due to the negative feedback loop of the proposed DCO, the feedback DCO presents a linear gain from an input digital word to an output frequency. Moreover, we can control the bandwidth of the feedback DCO to optimize the total output phase noise in DPLL. In simulation, we can obtain 17 MHz/LSB of the peak-to-peak gain of the feedback DCO, which is reduced 96% over the conventional DCO.