A Cost-Effective and Compact All-Digital Dual-Loop Jitter Attenuator for Built-Off-Test Applications

Abstract

A compact and low-power all-digital CMOS dual-loop jitter attenuator (DJA) for low-cost built-off-test (BOT) applications such as parallel multi-DUT testing is presented. The proposed DJA adopts a new digital phase interpolator (PI)-based clock recovery (CR) loop with an adaptive decimation filter (ADF) function to remove the jitter and phase noise of the input clock, and generate a phase-aligned clean output clock. In addition, by adopting an all-digital multi-phase multiplying delay-locked loop (MDLL), eight low-jitter evenly spaced reference clocks that are required for the PI are generated. In the proposed DJA, both the MDLL and PI-based CR are first-order systems, and so this DJA has the advantage of high system stability. In addition, the proposed DJA has the benefit of a wide operating frequency range, unlike general PLL-based jitter attenuators that have a narrow frequency range and a jitter peaking problem. Implemented in a 40 nm 0.9 V CMOS process, the proposed DJA generates cleaned programmable output clock frequencies from 2.4 to 4.7 GHz. Furthermore, it achieves a peak-to-peak and RMS jitter attenuation of –25.6 dB and –32.6 dB, respectively, at 2.4 GHz. In addition, it occupies an active area of only 0.0257 mm2 and consumes a power of 7.41 mW at 2.4 GHz. © 2022 by the authors.