A 1.7GHz MDLL-based fractional-N frequency synthesizer with 1.4ps RMS integrated jitter and 3mW power using a 1b TDC

The introduction of inductorless frequency synthesizers into standardized wireless systems still requires a high level of innovation in order to achieve the stringent requirements of low noise and low power consumption. Synthesizers based on the so-called multiplying delay-locked loop (MDLL) represent one of the most promising architectures in this direction [1-3]. An MDLL resembles a ring oscillator, in which the signal edge traveling along the delay line is periodically refreshed by a clean edge of the reference clock. In this manner, the phase noise of the ring oscillator is filtered up to half the reference frequency and the total output jitter is reduced significantly. Unfortunately, the concept of MDLL, and in general of injection locking (IL), is inherently limited to integer-N synthesis, which makes it unacceptable in practical RF systems. A first extension of injection locking to coarse fractional-N resolution has been shown in [4], in which however the fractional resolution is bounded to the inverse of the number of ring-oscillator delay stages. This paper introduces a fractional-N MDLL-based frequency synthesizer with a 1b time/digital converter (TDC), which is able to outreach the performance of inductorless fractional-N synthesizers. The prototype synthesizes frequencies between 1.6 and 1.9GHz with 190Hz resolution and achieves RMS integrated jitter of 1.4ps at 3mW power consumption, even in the worst-case of near-integer channel.