A 1.8 V 0.18-μm 1 GHz CMOS Fast-Lock Phase-Locked Loop using a Frequency-to-Digital Converter

Abstract

A 1 GHz CMOS fast-lock phase-locked loop (PLL) is proposed to support the quick wake-up time of mobile consumer electronic devices. The proposed fast-lock PLL consists of a conventional charge-pump PLL, a frequency-to-digital converter (FDC) to measure the frequency of the input reference clock, and a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) to generate the initial control voltage of a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). The initial control voltage of the VCO is driven toward a reference voltage that is determined by the frequency of the input reference clock in the initial mode. For the speedy measurement of the frequency of the reference clock, an FDC with a parallel architecture is proposed, and its architecture is similar to that of a flash analog-to-digital converter. In addition, the frequency-to-voltage converter used in the FDC is designed simply by utilizing current integrators. The circuits for the proposed fast-lock scheme are disabled in the normal operation mode except in the initial mode to reduce the power consumption. The proposed PLL was fabricated by using a 0.18-μm 1-poly 6-metal complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process with a 1.8 V supply. This PLL multiplies the frequency of the reference clock by 10 and generates the four-phase clock. The simulation results show a reduction of up to 40% in the worst-case PLL lock time over the device operating conditions. The root-mean-square (rms) jitter of the proposed PLL was measured as 2.94 ps at 1 GHz. The area and power consumption of the implemented PLL are 400 × 450 μm2 and 6 mW, respectively.