Reducing power consumption is becoming increasingly important for the sustainability of the communication industry because it is expected to consume a significant portion of the global electricity in the face of the exponentially increasing demands on the volume and rate of data transmission. As the scope narrows to the individual wireless device level, the reduced power consumption helps to extend the lifetime of battery-powered devices, thereby leading to improved user experience and enabling the development of innovative applications. The quest for the lower power consumption will profoundly shape the wireless transceiver design, i.e., each critical block in the system should constantly reduce its drained power without sacrificing the performance. With this background, the thesis focuses on the phase-locked loops (PLL) that generate RF clocks for wireless transceivers, and develops low-power techniques suppressing the fractional-spur levels when the PLL generates unmodulated carrier, and the phase modulation (PM) error when the PLL additionally serves as a two-point modulator...@en

This article introduces a low-jitter low-spur fractional-N phase-locked loop (PLL) adopting a new concept of a time-mode arithmetic unit (TAU) for phase error extraction. The TAU is a time-signal processor that calculates the weighted sum of input time offsets. It processes two inputs - the period of a digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) and the instantaneous time offset between the DCO and reference clock edges - and then extracts the DCO phase error by calculating their weighted sum. The prototype, implemented in 40-nm CMOS, achieves 182-fs rms jitter with 3.5-mW power consumption. In a near-integer channel, it shows the worst fractional spur below -59 dBc. Under considerable supply or temperature variations, the worst spur still remains below -51.7 dBc without any background calibration tracking.@en

In this article, we present a low-power digital phase-locked loop (PLL)-based phase modulator targeting low error vector magnitude (EVM). We introduce a new non-uniform clock compensation (NUCC) scheme to tackle an EVM degradation resulting from the beneficial use of a time-varying sampling clock that is re-timed to the phase-modulated carrier. We also employ a phase-domain digital predistortion (DPD) to combat the intrinsic non-linearity of an LC-type digitally controlled oscillator (DCO), thus avoiding the complications of frequency-dependent calibrations. The prototype, implemented in 40-nm CMOS, modulates the carrier in the range of 2.7-3.9 GHz from a 40-MHz reference. The measured EVM is -47 dB for a 60-Mb/s 64-PSK modulation under the case that the phase-modulated output is frequency-divided by K=8 , i.e., when the DCO exhibits the most significant non-linearity due to the large fractional FM bandwidth. When K=8 or 4, the measured EVM remains below -43 dB across the carrier-frequency tuning range and without re-calibrating the DCO non-linearity.@en

This paper proposes a mm-wave quadrature frequency generator using injection-locked harmonic extractors (HEs) incorporated with quadrature class-F oscillators. While maintaining high output levels at 28 GHz, the utilization of injection locking technique improves the effective quality ($Q$)-factor and helps to achieve a fundamental harmonic suppression of 60 dB. This results in an FoM of the entire frequency generation system reaching -184 dB. The consideration of quadrature phase mismatch induced by electromagnetic coupling between quadrature buffers is also discussed.@en

Parasitic coupling between the building blocks within a fractional- N phase-locked loop (PLL) can result in noticeable spurs in its output spectrum, thus affecting the PLL’s usability in ultralow jitter applications. In this article, we focus on a chief contributor—“self-interference” caused by coupling from the PLL’s frequency-reference (FREF) clock buffer to the RF oscillator, while exploiting the fact that the resulting phase-disturbance pattern: 1) exhibits a sinusoidal shape and 2) is synchronized with the PLL’s output clock phase. Accordingly, we propose a digitally intensive pattern-aware approach to suppress the fundamental fractional spur raised by this self-interference mechanism. The proposed technique is applied to a fabricated digital PLL chip and reduces the worst spur level by 13 dB, thus proving its effectiveness.@en

In a fractional-N PLL, it is beneficial to minimize the input range of its phase detector (PD) as it promotes better linearity and higher PD gain for suppressing noise contributions of the following loop components. This can be done by canceling the predicted instantaneous time offset between the frequency reference (FREF) and the variable oscillator-clock (CKV) edges prior to the PD. There are currently two main cancellation strategies. The first is to align FREF and CKV by inserting a digital-to-time converter (DTC) on either path. However, due to the DTC nonlinearity and its susceptibility to PVT variations, the PLL can suffer from large fractional spurs. Although system-level techniques, e.g., background calibration [1], supply ripple reduction [2], and DTC code randomization [3], can partially alleviate these DTC issues, the overall system complexity worsens. The second method is to convert and cancel the predicted time offset in the voltage domain [4]. This arrangement is less sensitive to PVT variations. However, the accuracy of the time-to-voltage conversion relies on the strict trade-offs between the power consumption, noise, and linearity of a current source. In this work, we introduce a third solution based on a time-mode arithmetic unit (TAU), which outputs a weighted sum of time delays between the (falling) edges of FREF and CKV, as well as between two consecutive CKV edges. Compared with DTC-based solutions, it is less sensitive to PVT variations, as its output merely varies by the ratio of RC time constants, thus ensuring low fractional spurs with no extra system complexity. Compared to the voltage-domain solutions, the absence of a current source is beneficial for phase-noise optimization and migration to more advanced technology nodes. Moreover, TAU can implicitly provide a time-amplification (TA) gain, thus further suppressing the noise of subsequent blocks.@en

We present a broadband digital PLL (DPLL)-based phase modulator supporting wide frequency modulation (FM) bandwidth (BW). It compensates for the EVM degradation due to the non-uniform period of the retimed updating clock and shortens the nonlinearity calibration time of the digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) with a phase-domain digital pre-distortion (DPD) and an encoding-assisted (EA)-LMS calibration. While generating a 10MHz 64-PSK signal, the prototype can achieve -46dB EVM with less than one-tenth of the calibration samples (time) required by the prior art. @en