A Low-Jitter and Low-Reference-Spur Ring-VCO-Based Switched-Loop Filter PLL Using a Fast Phase-Error Correction Technique

Abstract

A low-jitter and low-reference-spur ring-type voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO)-based switched-loop filter (SLF) phase-locked loop (PLL) is presented. To enhance the capability of suppressing jitter of a VCO, we propose a fast phase-error correction (FPEC) technique that emulates the phase-realignment mechanism of an injection-locked clock multiplier. By the proposed FPEC technique, accumulated jitter of a VCO can be removed intensively in a short interval, thereby suppressing jitter dramatically. Based on a PLL topology having an intrinsic integrator in a VCO, the proposed architecture can also achieve a low reference spur despite a high multiplication factor (i.e., 64). This paper also presents the selective frequency-tuning technique used in the VCO that helps the proposed architecture further suppress the level of reference spur. The proposed PLL was fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process. The measured rms jitter integrated from 1 kHz to 80 MHz and the reference spur of the output signal with a 3.008-GHz frequency were 357 fs and -71 dBc, respectively. The total active area was 0.047 mm2, and the power consumption was 4.6 mW.