A power-efficient wide-range phase-locked loop

This work presents a phase-locked loop for clock generation that consists of a phase/frequency detector, charge pump, loop filter, range-programmable voltage-controlled ring oscillator, and programmable divider. The phase/frequency detector and charge pump are designed to reduce the dead zone and charge sharing for enhancing the locking performance, respectively. In the design of the range-programmable voltage-controlled oscillator, the original inverter ring of a delay line is divided into several smaller ones, and then they are recombined in parallel to each other. Programming the number of paralleled inverter rings allows us to generate the wide-range clock frequencies. This design shuts off some inverters that are not in use to reduce power consumption. To allow the phase-locked loop to shut off inverters, the feasibility of using controllable inverters by the output-switch and power-switch schemes is explored. Theoretical analyses indicate that power consumption of the voltage-controlled oscillator depends on transistors' sizes rather than operating frequencies. By applying the TSMC 0.35-mum CMOS technology, the proposed phase-locked loop that uses the power-switch scheme can yield clock signals ranging from 103 MHz to 1.02 GHz at a supply voltage of 1.8 V. Moreover, power dissipation that is proportional to the number of paralleled inverter rings is measured with 1.32 to 4.59 mW. The phase-locked loop proposed herein can be used in various digital systems, providing power-efficient and wide-range clock signals for task-oriented computations.