An all digital PLL with an active inductor DCO for LTE applications in 0.13 μm CMOS

In this paper, we propose a low-power all digital phase-locked loop with a wide input range, and a high resolution TDC that uses phase-interpolator and a time amplifier. The resolution of the proposed TDC is improved by using a phase-interpolator which divides the inverter delay time and the time amplifier which extends the time difference between the reference frequency and the DCO clock. The phase noise of the proposed ADPLL is improved by using a fine resolution DCO with an active inductor. In order to control the frequency of the DCO, the transconductance of the active inductor is tuned digitally. To cover the wide tuning range and to operate at a low-power, a three-step coarse tuning scheme is used. In addition, the DCO gain needs to be calibrated digitally in order to compensate for gain variations. The die area of the ADPLL is 0.8 mm² using 0.13 μm CMOS technology. The frequency resolution of the TDC is 1 ps. The DCO tuning range is 58% at 2.4 GHz and the effective DCO frequency resolution is 0.14 kHz. The phase noise of the ADPLL output at 2.4 GHz is −120.5 dBc/Hz with a 1 MHz offset. The total power consumption of the ADPLL is 12 mW from a 1.2 V supply voltage.     

Multiband RF-sampling receiver front-end with on-chip testability in 0.13 μm CMOS

In this paper a flexible RF-sampling front-end primarily intended for WLAN standards operating in the 2.4 GHz and 5–6 GHz bands is presented. The circuit is implemented with on-chip Design for Test (DfT) features in 0.13 μm CMOS process. The front-end consists of a wideband LNA, a sampling IQ down-converter implemented as switched-capacitor decimation filter, test attenuator (TA), and RF detectors. The architecture is generic and scalable in frequency. It can operate at a sampling frequency up to 3 GHz and RF carrier up to 6 GHz with 2× subsampling. The selectable decimation factor of 8 or 16 makes the A/D conversion feasible. The frequency response, linearity, and NF of the whole front-end have been measured. The power consumption of complete RF front-end is 176 mW. The on-chip DfT features are helpful in reduction of overall test cost and time in volume production. The measurement results show the feasibility of DfT approach for multiband radio receiver design using standard CMOS process.     

A readout IC for an uncooled microbolometer infrared FPA with on-chip self-heating compensation in 0.35 μm CMOS

This paper describes a readout integrated circuit architecture for an infrared focal plane array intended for infrared network-attached video cameras in surveillance applications. The focal plane array consists of 352 × 288 uncooled thin-film microbolometer detectors with a pitch of 25 μm, enabling ambient temperature operation. The circuit features a low-noise readout path, detector resistance mismatch correction and a non-linear ramped current pulse scheme for the electrical biasing of the detectors in order to relax the dynamic range requirement of amplifiers and the ADC in the readout channel, imposed by detector process variation and self-heating during readout. The design is implemented in a 0.35-μm standard CMOS process and two versions of a smaller 32 × 32-pixel test chip have been fabricated and measured for evaluation. The latest test chip achieves a dynamic range of 97 dB and an input-referred RMS noise voltage of 6.4 μV yielding an estimated NETD value of 26 mK with f/1 optics. At a frame rate of 60 FPS the chip dissipates 170 mW of power from a 3.4 V supply.     

A 0.8-3 GHz RF-VGA with 35 dB dynamic range in 0.13μm CMOS

正A wideband variable gain amplifier(VGA) implemented in 0.13μm CMOS technology is presented. To optimize noise performance,an active feedback amplifier with 15 dB fixed gain is put in the front,followed by modified Cherry-Hooper amplifiers in cascade providing variable gain,which adopt dual loop feedback for bandwidth extension.Negative capacitive neutralization and capacitive source degeneration are employed for Miller effect compensation and DC offset cancellation,respectively.Measurement results show that the proposed VGA achieves a 35 dB gain tuning range with an upper 3-dB bandwidth larger than 3 GHz and the input 1 dB compression point of-29 dBm at the lowest gain state,while the minimum noise figure is 9 dB at the highest gain state. The core VGA(without test buffer) consumes 32 mW from 1.2 V power supply and occupies 0.48 mm2 area.     

A high speed, low voltage to high voltage level shifter in standard 1.2 V 0.13 μm CMOS

The design of a high speed, low voltage to high voltage level shifter in a digital 1.2 V, 0.13 μm CMOS technology is presented. The topology uses two differentially switched cascoded transistor ladders. The output signal has an offset of two times the nominal supply voltage of the used technology with respect to the input signal. Oxide stress and hot carrier degradation is minimized since all transistors of the level shifter operate within the voltage limits imposed by the design rules of a mainstream CMOS technology.     

A curvature calibrated bandgap reference with base-emitter current compensating in a 0.13μm CMOS process

In bandgap references,the effect caused by the input offset of the operational amplifier can be effectively reduced by the utilization of cascade bipolar junction transistors(BJTs).But in modern CMOS logic processes,due to the small value ofβ,the base-emitter path of BJTs has a significant streaming effect on the collector current,which leads to a large temperature drift for the reference voltage.To solve this problem,a base-emitter current compensating technique is proposed in a cascade BJT bandgap refe...     

A fully integrated direct-conversion digital satellite tuner in 0.18μm CMOS

A fully integrated direct-conversion digital satellite tuner for DVB-S/S2 and ABS-S applications is presented.A broadband noise-canceling Balun-LNA and passive quadrature mixers provided a high-linearity low noise RF front-end,while the synthesizer integrated the loop filter to reduce the solution cost and system debug time.Fabricated in 0.18μm CMOS,the chip achieves a less than 7.6 dB noise figure over a 900-2150 MHz L-band, while the measured sensitivity for 4.42 MS/s QPSK-3/4 mode is -91 dBm at the PCB connector.The fully integrated integer-N synthesizer operating from 2150 to 4350 MHz achieves less than 1℃integrated phase error. The chip consumes about 145 mA at a 3.3 V supply with internal integrated LDOs.     

A 10-bit 2.5-MS/s SAR ADC with 60.46 dB SNDR in 0.13-μm CMOS technology

This paper presents a 10-bit 2.5-MS/s successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog- to-digital-converter (ADC) design for micro controller unit of signal process system. Because of the proposed new segmented architecture of 7 MSBs-plus-3 LSBs capacitor–resistor hybrid digital-to-analog-converter using a thermometer decoder for the most significant 5 MSBs, this design achieves superior static nonlinearity and dynamic performance of SNDR, SFDR. Utilizing the proposed deviation calibration technique, the discharging and charging via substrate resulting from deviation of the comparator’s common-mode voltage is cancelled. The ADC is fabricated in a standard 1P5M 0.13-μm CMOS technology. The peak DNL and INL are +0.18/?0.20-LSB, +0.30/?0.25 LSB respectively while the ENOB is 9.52-bit around all process–voltage–temperature corner analysis. At a 2.3-V supply voltage and a 2.5-MS/s sampling rate, the ADC achieves a SNDR of 60.46 dB, SFDR of 75.32 dB while the power dissipation is 0.191-mW, that resulting in a figure of merit of 98.45 fJ/c-s. The die of ADC measures 0.51 × 0.20 mm² resulting in area efficiency of 122.6 μm²/code and compared with the benchmark SAR ADCs, this work is the most area efficient design.     

A novel design of ultra-broadband,high-gain and high-linearity variable gain distributed amplifier in 0.13 μm CMOS technology

A high-gain, high-linearity and ultra-broadband variable gain distributed amplifier (VGDA) based on employing multiple techniques is presented to substantially increase the gain. The complete design is composed of two major parts including a VGDA part followed by a single stage distributed amplifier (SSDA) part. The VGDA part makes it possible to achieve different gain settings. For high gain considerations, the SSDA part cascades with the VGDA part that takes the benefits of the multiplicative gain mechanism. A theory is presented to enhance the linearity without imposing further DC power consumption. This idea has been validated by simulation results as expected. The design is analysed and simulated in the standard 0.13 μm CMOS technology. It presents the large gain tuning range of 35 dB, from –5 dB attenuation gain up to +30 dB maximum amplification gain, in relation to the control voltage (V_ctr) that varies between 0.42 and 1.1 V. At the maximum amplification gain setting, it presents a DC up to 16 GHz 3 dB bandwidth, an average noise figure of 3.2 dB and an IIP3 of –2 dB m. Furthermore, it dissipates 46.42 mW from 0.7 and 0.9 V power supplies of the drain lines of VGDA and SSDA parts, respectively. Additionally, the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation has been performed to predict an estimate of the accuracy of performance of the proposed design under various conditions.     

A 4224 MHz low jitter phase-locked loop in 0.13-μm CMOS technology

A 4224 MHz phase-locked loop(PLL) is implemented in 0.13μm CMOS technology.A dynamic phase frequency detector is employed to shorten the delay reset time so as to minimize the noise introduced by the charge pump.Dynamic mismatch of charge pump is considered.By balancing the switch signals of the charge pump,a good dynamic matching characteristic is achieved.A high-speed digital frequency divider with balanced input load is also designed to improve in-band phase noise performance.The 4224 MHz PLL achieves...     

A 4224 MHz low jitter phase-locked loop in 0.13-μm CMOS technology

A 4224 MHz phase-locked loop (PLL) is implemented in 0.13 μm CMOS technology. A dynamic phase frequency detector is employed to shorten the delay reset time so as to minimize the noise introduced by the charge pump. Dynamic mismatch of charge pump is considered. By balancing the switch signals of the charge pump, a good dynamic matching characteristic is achieved. A high-speed digital frequency divider with balanced input load is also designed to improve in-band phase noise performance. The 4224 MHz PLL achieves phase noises of-94 dBc/Hz and -114.4 dBc/Hz at frequency offsets of 10 kHz and 1 MHz, respectively. The integrated RMS jitter of the PLL is 0.57 ps (100 Hz to 100 MHz) and the PLL has a reference spur of-63 dB with the second order passive low pass filter.     

A 5 Gb/s transceiver in 0.13μm CMOS for PCIE2.0

This paper presents a CML transceiver for a PCI-express generation 2 physical layer protocol that has been fabricated by SMIC’s 0.13μm CMOS technology.The active area of the transceiver is 0.016 mm~2 and it consumes a total of 150 mW power at a 1.2 V supply voltage.The transmitter uses two stage pre-emphasis circuits with active inductors,reducing inter-symbol interference and extended bandwidth;the receiver uses a time-domain adaptive equalizer,the circuit uses an inductive peaking technique and extends the bandwidth,and the use of active inductors reduces the circuit area and power consumption effectively.The measurement results show that this circuit could stably transmit the signal at the data rate of 5 Gbps,the output signal swing of the transmitter is 350 mV with jitter of 14 ps,the eye opening of the receiver is 135 mV and the eye width is 0.56 UI.The circuit performance sufficiently meets the requirements of the PCI-Express 2.0 protocol.     

A wideband on-chip millimeter-wave patch antenna in 0.18 μm CMOS

A wideband on-chip millimeter-wave patch antenna in 0.18 μm CMOS with a low-resistivity(10Ω·cm) silicon substrate is presented.The wideband is achieved by reducing the Q factor and exciting the high-order radiation modes with size optimization.The antenna uses an on-chip top layer metal as the patch and a probe station as the ground plane.The on-chip ground plane is connected to the probe station using the inner connection structure of the probe station for better performance.The simulated S11 is less than –10 dB over 46–95 GHz,which is well matched with the measured results over the available 40–67 GHz frequency range from our measurement equipment.A maximum gain of –5.55 dBi with 4% radiation efficiency at a 60 GHz point is also achieved based on Ansoft HFSS simulation.Compared with the current state-of-the-art devices,the presented antenna achieves a wider bandwidth and could be used in wideband millimeter-wave communication and image applications.     

A low spur, low jitter 10-GHz phase-locked loop in 0.13-μm CMOS technology

This paper presents a 10-GHz low spur and low jitter phase-locked loop (PLL).An improved low phase noise VCO and a dynamic phase frequency detector with a short delay reset time are employed to reduce the noise of the PLL.We also discuss the methodology to optimize the high frequency prescaler's noise and the charge pump's current mismatch.The chip was fabricated in a SMIC 0.13-μm RF CMOS process with a 1.2-V power supply.The measured integrated RMS jitter is 757 fs (1 kHz to 10 MHz); the phase noise is -89 and-118.1 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz and 1 MHz frequency offset,respectively; and the reference frequency spur is below -77 dBc.The chip size is 0.32 mm2 and the power consumption is 30.6 mW.     

A 1.9 GHz ADPLL with 130 reference cycles settling time in 0.18 μm CMOS technology

A fast-settling all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) is presented in this paper. We propose two techniques for reducing the settling time of an ADPLL, i.e. the oscillator tuning word (OTW) presetting technique and counter-based mode switching controller (CB-MSC). In the first technique, the OTW is preset in process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) calibration mode (P-mode), which leads to the digitally controlled oscillator being initialized with a frequency closer to the target. In the second technique, the CB-MSC is used to shorten the mode switching time. A prototype 1.9 GHz ADPLL with a 13 MHz reference is implemented in 0.18 μm CMOS process. Measurements show that the proposed techniques reduce the settling time by about 33 %. The proposed ADPLL settles within 130 reference cycles and presents a phase noise of ?116 dBc/Hz@1 MHz.     

A low spur,low jitter 10-GHz phase-locked loop in 0.13-μm CMOS technology

This paper presents a 10-GHz low spur and low jitter phase-locked loop(PLL).An improved low phase noise VCO and a dynamic phase frequency detector with a short delay reset time are employed to reduce the noise of the PLL.We also discuss the methodology to optimize the high frequency prescaler's noise and the charge pump's current mismatch.The chip was fabricated in a SMIC 0.13-μm RF CMOS process with a 1.2-V power supply.The measured integrated RMS jitter is 757 fs(1 kHz to 10 MHz);the phase noise is-89 ...