A Wide-Range Low-Jitter PLL Based on Fast-Response VCO and Simplified Straightforward Methodology of Loop Stabilization in Integer-N PLLs

Abstract

A straightforward methodology of optimizing ring-oscillator phase-locked loops (PLLs) is organized for integer-N PLLs. Then, a brief 4-step design flow is concluded to implicitly quantize the loop components for optimized loop stability. Theoretical analysis confirms that the ratio of more than 20 is required for loop filter's capacitors to yield at least 65° degrees phase margin. A wide-range voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) is proposed which is continuously controlled through two fast and slow response paths. The fast-response path improves RMS jitter due to decreasing loop delay and the slower one is an adaptive bias tuning loop, utilized to reduce the power consumption at lower operating frequencies. The RMS jitter of around 2 ps and 0.35 ps at 250 MHz and 4 GHz operating frequencies are obtained, respectively, where the 1.8 V supply voltage is subjected to about 60 mV peak-to-peak noise and reference clock suffers from 12 ps peak-to-peak jitter. Power consumption is reduced from 12.6–4 mW at 250 MHz operating frequency when the adaptive bias scheme is applied. Furthermore, simulation results confirm 35% and 50% improvement in RMS and peak-to-peak jitter at 250 MHz operating frequency, respectively, when the ratio of capacitances is increased from 10 to 20 within the loop filter. The proposed PLL can be implemented in 170 μm × 250 μm active area in 0.18 μm CMOS process.