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1, JANUARY 2012
Manuscript received May 31, 2010; revised September 01, 2010; accepted
October 07, 2010. Date of publication November 18, 2010; date of current ver-
From (2), the square of the first and second pole frequency (i.e.,
sion December 14, 2011. This work was supported in part by NTU-MediaTek and ) can be expressed as
lab and in part by NSC, Taiwan.
The authors are with the Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering and
Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei
10617, Taiwan (e-mail: lsi@cc.ee.ntu.edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. (3)
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVLSI.2010.2088144
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
(10)
, loading inductors, and , varactors, , parasitic
From (9) and (10), the phases at nodes and are in phase and capacitances, and , common-source amplifiers, and
out of phase at and , respectively. Fig. 2 shows the , cross-coupled pair, and , and tail current sources,
simulated magnitude of to demonstrate this phenomenon. and . The fourth-order resonator is composed of
With pH and fF, the , and . Based on (10), nodes
upper figure shows that has a maximum value located at and should be out of phase to ensure the fourth-order
the first pole frequency of 41 GHz while and are in resonator to oscillate at . Thus, two common-source
phase. On the other hand, the lower figure of Fig. 2 shows that amplifiers, and , are adopted to provide 180 phase dif-
resonates at the second pole frequency of 100 GHz ference between and and satisfy the condition
while and are out of phase. As a comparison, a higher of (10). The cross-coupled pair formed by and has two
resonant frequency can be obtained at , and is functions. First, the cross-coupled pair produces a negative re-
about 144% higher than . Using this property, it is possible sistance (i.e., ) to compensate
for a VCO with the fourth-order resonator to oscillate at a the component loss of and . Second, it facilitates
high frequency of . the proposed VCO to operate differentially.
Fig. 4 shows the small-signal half-circuit of the proposed
B. Analysis of Proposed VCO With Fourth-Order VCO. With narrow band approximation, the loss of is mod-
LC Resonator eled to parallel with a resistor . Similarly, the losses of
Fig. 3 shows the circuit diagram of the proposed VCO, and and are modeled to parallel with a resistor . Consid-
the proposed VCO is composed of feedback inductors, and ering the case similar to previous section (i.e.,
82 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS, VOL. 20, NO. 1, JANUARY 2012
where is the transconductance of the cross-coupled tran- C. Design Considerations of Passive Components
sistors. To compare (12) with (14), the proposed VCO has a in Proposed VCO
higher oscillation frequency and achieve a frequency enhance- Fig. 6(a) depicts the inductor in the proposed VCO. The in-
ment of 84.7%. In the minimum required transcoductance for ductor is basically realized by a top metal line (the sixth metal
reliable oscillation, the transconductance of the proposed VCO layer with m) with U-shape. Fig. 6(b)
is at , shows the folded structure in [9], and a brief comparison be-
whereas that of the cross-coupled VCO is at tween Fig. 6(a) and (b) will be discussed later. In the design of
(11)
TSAI AND LIU: A 104-GHZ PHASE-LOCKED LOOP USING A VCO AT SECOND POLE FREQUENCY 83
Fig. 6. (a) U-shape inductor in the proposed VCO. (b) Folded structure in [9].
(c) Simulated L and Q of the U-shape inductor with fixed length (100 m) but
different W and S . (d) Simulated L and Q of the U-shape inductor (hollow Fig. 7. (a) Varactor in the proposed VCO. (b) Simulated C-V curves and Q
circles) and the folded structure in [9] (solid circles). at 100 GHz with different dimension but fixed area (i.e., the same L2 W
value).
Fig. 9. Block diagram of the PLL integrated with the proposed VCO.
and the simulated in Fig. 7(b), the tuning range of the
proposed VCO is finally designed within 2 GHz while consid-
ering the trade-off among the poor of varactors, VCO
performance above 100 GHz, and integration into a PLL.
Four inductors in the proposed VCO may lead to difficulties
in the layout and need long interconnects. Using three U-shape
inductors with identical size, the floor plan of Fig. 8 is adopted
to improve this layout issue of the proposed VCO. The vertical
inductor in Fig. 8 has a center tap which is connected to .
Because the proposed VCO operates differentially, the center
tap is AC grounded, and therefore the inductance of this ver-
tical inductor is equally divided. Such a characteristic results
in and satisfies the require-
ment of inductance value in (11) and (12). With this layout style,
, and are closed to each other, and then the par-
asitics of layout routing among these nodes can be reduced. Fig. 10. PFD [14] in the PLL.
Moreover, the opposite placement between and can also
diminish the mutual coupling effect of inductors.
the output of the 4-input NAND gate to reduce the dead zone
D. PLL Design problem of the PFD. However, one of the disadvantages of using
To measure a free running VCO above 100 GHz is a chal- the delay cell in a PFD is that the degeneration of PFD opera-
lenging work since VCO spectra are sensitive to external per- tion speed. Fortunately, as discussed in [14], the operation speed
turbation such as supply and temperature variations. Therefore, of the PFD in Fig. 10 is unaffected by the delay cell, and then
the proposed VCO is integrated into a PLL to generate stable the PFD operation speed can be improved. Designed in 1.2-V
spectra for measurement. Furthermore, the PLL with the pro- 65-nm CMOS process, the simulated operation speed of this
posed VCO also demonstrates the possibility for clock genera- PFD is up to 600 MHz. In PLL integration, the digital noise
tion above 100 GHz. of PFD would be an issue because the noise may affect the sen-
Fig. 9 shows the block diagram of the PLL, and the PLL is sitive circuits (e.g., VCO and ILFD) in a PLL through the sil-
composed of the proposed VCO, a phase-frequency detector icon substrate. In the consideration of digital noise, some guard
(PFD) [14], a charge pump (CP), an integrated second-order rings are adopted to reduce the effect of the digital noise caused
loop filter (2nd LF), and a divider chain with three different by PFD. The second-order loop filter is fully integrated into the
kinds of divider circuits. Because the proposed VCO is designed PLL, and it is composed of two capacitors ( and ) and
to oscillate above 100 GHz, an injection-locked frequency di- one resistor . and are implemented by metal-insu-
vider (ILFD) [11] is utilized as the first divider for the trade-off lator-metal (MIM) capacitors, and is a polysilicon resistor
between power consumption and operation speed. Following the with large size to alleviate process variations. The design pa-
ILFD, the divide-by-16 dividers in Fig. 9 are realized by four rameters of the PLL are listed in Table I. The simulated loop
current-mode-logic (CML) dividers. The first and second stages bandwidth and the phase margin of the PLL are 2 MHz and 65 ,
of the divide-by-16 dividers adopt inductive-peaking technique respectively.
[15] to improve their operation speed. Behind the divide-by-16
dividers, the divide-by-8 stage in the PLL is realized by true- III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
single-phase-clocking (TSPC) logics [16] to further save the Fig. 11 shows the die photo of the PLL integrated with the
power consumption of the divider chain. Fig. 10 shows the PFD proposed VCO. Fabricated in 1.2-V 65-nm CMOS process, the
in the PLL. The PFD consists of 11 NAND gates which are chip area of the PLL is 0.84 mm with pads. For a 1.2-V supply,
realized by static logics. In Fig. 10, a delay cell is inserted at the power consumption of the PLL is 63 mW, of which 12 mW
TSAI AND LIU: A 104-GHZ PHASE-LOCKED LOOP USING A VCO AT SECOND POLE FREQUENCY 85
TABLE I
DESIGN PARAMETERS OF THE PLL
Fig. 13. Measured and post-simulated tuning curves of the proposed VCO.
Fig. 11. Die photo of the PLL integrated with the proposed VCO.
Fig. 15. Reference spur measurement of the PLL at f = 103:936 GHz for f = 406 MHz.
phase noise measurement of the PLL. According to Fig. 16,
the measured loop bandwidth of the PLL is about 1.8 MHz
at GHz, and the measured loop bandwidth
is slightly lower than the simulated value. One of the pos-
sible reasons for the bandwidth deviation is that the measured
VCO gain ( GHz/V) is lower than the simulated
value ( GHz/V) listed in Table I. The in-band and
out-band phase noise of the PLL are dBc/Hz (at 1-MHz
offset) and dBc/Hz (at 10-MHz offset), respectively.
Because the out-band phase noise of a PLL is usually con-
tributed by the VCO, the phase noise of the proposed VCO can
be also obtained from Fig. 16, which is about dBc/Hz
at 10-MHz offset. Fig. 17 presents frequency-hopping mea-
surement of the PLL. The hopping property is measured from
(about 3.248 GHz). When periodically varies
between 405.5 MHz and 406.5 MHz, is able to lock
between 3.244 GHz and 3.252 GHz. The hopping time of the
PLL is about 50 s when the frequency error is less than 4 ppm.
The jitter performance of the PLL at
is shown in Fig. 18, and the rms jitter and peak-to-peak jitter
are 2.44 ps and 18 ps, respectively. Finally, the measured per-
formance of the proposed VCO and PLL are summarized in
Tables II and III and compared with previous work imple-
mented by nanoscale CMOS technology.
IV. CONCLUSION
The design and implementation of a high-speed VCO above
100 GHz has been presented. Oscillating at secondary resonant
pole, the output frequency of the proposed VCO can be im-
proved. The proposed VCO is also incorporated into a fully in-
tegrated PLL for the purposes of measurement and stable clock
signal generation. For a 1.2-V supply, the tuning range of the
proposed VCO is from 103.057 to 104.581 GHz. The measured
phase noise of the proposed VCO is about dBc/Hz at
10-MHz offset. In the PLL, the locking range of the PLL is from
103.058 to 104.58 GHz by changing reference frequency, and
Fig. 16. Closed-loop phase noise measurement of the PLL at f =
103 936
: GHz. (a) In-band phase noise at 1-MHz offset. (b) Out-band phase the in-band phase noise of the PLL is dBc/Hz at 1-MHz
noise at 10-MHz offset. offset.
TSAI AND LIU: A 104-GHZ PHASE-LOCKED LOOP USING A VCO AT SECOND POLE FREQUENCY 87
TABLE III
SUMMARY OF THE PLL AND COMPARISON WITH PREVIOUS WORK
TABLE II
SUMMARY OF THE PROPOSED VCO AND COMPARISON WITH PRIOR VCOS
NEAR 100 GHZ
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Editorial Board of Research Letters in Electronics in 2008–2009. He also has
been an Associate Editor for IEICE (The Institute of Electronics, Information
Kun-Hung Tsai (S’07) was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and Communication Engineers) Transactions on Electronics since 2008. He
in 1981. He received the B.S. degree in electrical en- is an Associate Editor for ETRI Journal, and also an Associate Editor for the
gineering from National Central University, Jhongli, Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science, Korea, since 2009. He is
Taiwan, in 2003 and the M.S. degree in electronics a member of IEICE.
engineering from National Chiao-Tung University,
Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2005. He is currently working
toward the Ph.D. degree in electronics engineering,
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
His research interests include phase-locked system
and millimeter-wave circuit design.