Copyright © 2010 Jun Zhao and Yong-Bin Kim. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

A low-power and low-jitter 12-bit CMOS digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) design is presented. The Low-Power CMOS DCO is designed based on the ring oscillator implemented with Schmitt trigger inverters. The proposed DCO circuit uses control codes of thermometer type to reduce jitters. Performance of the DCO is verified through a novel All Digital Phase-Locked Loop (ADPLL) designed with a unique lock-in process by employing a time-to-digital converter, where both the frequency of the reference clock and the delay between DCO_output and DCO_clock is measured. A carefully designed reset process reduces the phase acquisition process to two cycles. The ADPLL was implemented using the 32 nm Predictive Technology Model (PTM) at 0.9 V supply voltage, and the simulation results show that the proposed ADPLL achieves 10 and 2 reference cycles of frequency and phase acquisitions, respectively, at 700 MHz with less than 67 ps peak-to-peak jitter. The DCO consumes 2.2 mW at 650 MHz with 0.9 V power supply.