Abstract:
Injection locking of oscillators is a known technique to improve the oscillator's phase noise performance. Generally, this is done by running two or more oscillators that...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Injection locking of oscillators is a known technique to improve the oscillator's phase noise performance. Generally, this is done by running two or more oscillators that are linked through a passive or active coupling mechanism. Therefore, the power consumption (at least) doubles, leading to no improvement regarding the standard figure-of-merit (FoM). This work discloses a new coupling mechanism for locked oscillators, that reuses the supply current and builds upon the fact that inverters implemented in modern CMOS processes are able to reach reasonable oscillating frequencies even without using the full nominal supply voltage range. Instead of instantiating the oscillators “side-by-side”, the propo scheme stacks oscillators between the supply terminal, thus reusing the drawn current at the same time as dividing the available supply voltage among the oscillators. Aiming for proper voltage division, we exploit a property of the ring oscillators, in which they are able to keep the same power consumption while the number of phases is increased/decreased. In the presented approach, the phase-noise performance improves without a penalty in power consumption, thus also improving the FoM. Simulation results show that by coupling two oscillators at f0 and 2f0, the higher frequency oscillator locks and inherits the better phase noise performance of the lower frequency oscillator, while reusing the same current, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed topology.
Date of Conference: 26-29 May 2019
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 01 May 2019
Print ISBN:978-1-7281-0397-6
Print ISSN: 2158-1525