Jitter and metastability analysis and modeling of multilevel bang-bang phase detector

Bang-bang phase detector (BBPD) is one of the essential blocks in the phase-locked loop and clock and data recovery that are used in transceivers. But BBPD has the metastability problem as data change in timing window. It suffers from not only metastability failure but also quantization noise, which causes output jitter. In this paper, the novel model is presented to evaluate the effect of both metastability and jitter on ML-BBPD, and also, it is shown that multilevel BBPD (ML-BBPD) has the improved quantization noise in comparison with the Alexander BBPD. In this model, it is shown that by increasing the oversampling ratio, the quantization noise is decreased, and with the metastability effect and the increment of quantization steps, the characteristic curve of the ML-BBPD becomes more smoothed. Also, the output jitter of ML-BBPD, in which metastability failure is diminished, is modeled. The error function in the model is simulated at system level and compares with the results achieved from simulation at circuit level to prove the validity of the proposed model. The simulation is done in TSMC 65-nm CMOS technology under 1-V supply voltage to compare the characteristic of ML-BBPD for various number of sampling clocks.