Generation of a low-jitter, high-frequency clock from a low-frequency reference clock using classical analog phase-locked loops (PLLs) requires a large loop filter capacitor and power hungry oscillator. Digital PLLs can help reduce area but their jitter performance is severely degraded by quantization error. In this dissertation different clock multiplication techniques have been explored that can be suitable for high-speed wireline systems. With the emphasis on ring oscillator based architecture using cascaded stages, three possible architectures are explored.
First, a scrambling TDC (STDC) is presented to improve deterministic jitter (DJ) performance when used with a low-frequency reference clock. A cascaded architecture with digital multiplying delay locked loop as the first stage and hybrid analog/digital PLL as the second stage is used to achieve low random jitter in a power efficient manner. Fabricated in a 90nm CMOS process, the prototype frequency synthesizer consumes 4.76mW power from a 1.0V supply and generates 160MHz and 2.56 GHz output clocks from a 1.25MHz crystal reference frequency. The long-term absolute jitter of the 60MHz digital MDLL and 2.56 GHz digital PLL outputs are 2.4 psrms and 4.18 psrms, while the peak-to-peak jitter is 22.1 ps and 35.2 ps, respectively. The proposed frequency synthesizer occupies an active die area of 0.16mm2 and achieves power efficiency of 1.86 mW/GHz.
Second, a hybrid phase/current-mode phase interpolator (HPC-PI) is presented to improve phase noise performance of ring oscillator-based fractional-N PLLs. The proposed HPC-PI alleviates the bandwidth trade-off between VCO phase noise suppression and ΔΣ quantization noise suppression. By combining the phase detection and interpolation functions into an XOR phase detector/interpolator (XOR PD-PI) block, accurate quantization error cancellation is achieved without using calibration. Use of a digital MDLL in front of the fractional-N PLL helps in alleviating the bandwidth limitation due to reference frequency and enables bandwidth extension even further. The extended bandwidth helps in suppressing the ring-VCO phase noise and lowering the in-band noise floor. Fabricated in 65nm CMOS process, the prototype generates fractional frequencies from 4.25 to 4.75 GHz, with an in-band phase noise floor of -104 dBc/Hz and 1.5 psrms integrated jitter. The clock multiplier achieves power efficiency of 2.4mW/GHz and FoM of -225.8 dB.
Finally, an efficient clock generation, recovery, and distribution techniques for flexible-rate transceivers are presented. Using a fixed-frequency low-jitter clock provided by an integer-N PLL, fractional frequencies are generated/recovered locally using multi-phase fractional clock multipliers. Fabricated in a 65nm CMOS, the prototype transceiver can be programmed to operate at any rate from 3-to-10 Gb/s. At 10 Gb/s, integrated jitter of the Tx output and recovered clock is 360 fsrms and 758 fsrms, respectively
