Abstract
This paper presents the co-design of a class-D digitally-controlled oscillator (DCO) and a low-dropout voltage regulator (LDO) generating the supply voltage for the DCO. Despite the high intrinsic supply pushing of the class-D oscillator topology, the LDO noise has only a very marginal impact on the DCO phase noise. The class-D DCO and LDO have been integrated in a 65nm CMOS process without any thick top metal layer. The oscillation frequency is tunable between 3.0 GHz and 4.3 GHz, for a tuning range of 36%, with a fine frequency step below 3 kHz and a fine frequency range of 10MHz (both measured at 3 GHz). Drawing 9.0mA from 0.4V (corresponding to an unregulated supply voltage of 0.6 V), the phase noise is -145.5 dBc/Hz at a 10MHz offset from a 3.0 GHz carrier. The resulting FoM is 189.5 dBc/Hz, and varies less than 1 dB across the tuning range. The FoM increases to above 190 dBc/Hz when the regulated supply voltage is 0.5V.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings Of The 40th European Solid-State Circuit Conference (ESSCIRC 2014) |
| Publisher | IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. |
| Pages | 335-338 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2014 |
| Event | European Solid State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC), 2014 - Venezia Lido, ITALY, Venice, Italy Duration: 2014 Sept 22 → 2014 Sept 26 Conference number: 40 |
Publication series
| Name | |
|---|---|
| ISSN (Print) | 1930-8833 |
Conference
| Conference | European Solid State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC), 2014 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Italy |
| City | Venice |
| Period | 2014/09/22 → 2014/09/26 |
Subject classification (UKÄ)
- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering
Free keywords
- VCO
- DCO
- class-D
- low phase noise
- high efficiency
- CMOS
- low-voltage
- LDO
- voltage regulator