Design Techniques for Timing Circuits in Wireline and Wireless Communication Systems

• Main Author: Huang, Deping
• Other Authors: Roveda, Janet Meiling
• Language: en_US
• Published: The University of Arizona. 2014
• Subjects: clock and data recovery; frequency synthesizer; oscillator; PLL; Electrical & Computer Engineering; automatic frequency calibration
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/344107

Clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit and frequency synthesizer are two essential timing circuits in wireline and wireless communication systems, respectively. With multigigabits/s high speed links and emerging 4G wireless system widely used in communication backbone infrastructures and consumer electronic devices, effective design of CDR and frequency synthesizer has become more and more important. The advanced scaled-down CMOS process has the limitations of leakage current, low supply voltage and process variation which pose great challenge to the analog circuit design. To overcome these issues, a digital intensive CDR solution is needed. Besides, it is desirable for the CDR to cover a wide range of data-rate and to be reference-less for improved flexibility. As for the frequency synthesizer design, the support for multi-standard to reduce the cost and area is desirable. In this work, a digital reference-less CDR is proposed to support continuous datarate ranging from 1 Gbps to 16 Gbps. The CDR adopts an 8 GHz~16 GHz DCO to achieve low random noise performance. A reference-less digital frequency locking loop is included in the system as the acquisition assistance for the CDR loop. To address the difficulty of jitter and stability evaluations for bang-band CDR, a Simulink model is developed to find out the jitter transfer (JTRAN), jitter generation (JGEN) and jitter tolerance (JTOL) performances for the CDR. The prototype CDR is implemented in a 65 nm CMOS process. The core area is 0.68 mm². At 16 Gbps, the CDR consumes a power of 92.5 mW and is able to tolerate a sinusoidal jitter with an amplitude of 0.4 UI and a frequency of 4 MHz. The second part of this dissertation develops a frequency synthesizer for multistandard wireless receivers. The frequency synthesizer is based on an analog fractional-N PLL. Optimally-coupled quadrature voltage-controlled-oscillator (QVCO), dividers and harmonic rejection single sideband mixer (HR-SSBmixer) are combined to synthesize the desired frequency range without posing much phase noise penalty on the QVCO. The QVCO adopts a new phase-shift scheme to improve phase noise and to eliminate bimodal oscillation. Combining harmonic rejection and single sideband mixing, the HR-SSBmixer is developed to suppress spurious signals. Designed in a 0.13-μm CMOS technology, the synthesizer occupies an active area of 1.86 mm² and consumes 35.6 to 52.62 mW of power. Measurement results show that the synthesizer frequency range, the phase noise, the settling time and the spur performances meet the specifications of the wireless receivers for the above standards. For a wide range frequency synthesizer, an automatic frequency calibration circuit (AFC) is needed to select proper oscillator tuning curve before the PLL settling. An improved counter-based AFC is proposed in this dissertation that provides a more robust and faster tuning curve searching process. The proposed AFC adopts a time-to-digital converter (TDC), which is able to captures the fractional VCO cycle information within the counting window, to improve the AFC frequency detection accuracy. The TDC-based AFC is designed in a 0.13-μm CMOS technology. Simulation results show that the TDCbased AFC greatly improves the frequency detection accuracy and consequently for a given frequency detection resolution reduces the AFC calibration time.