A 161.9-fs RMS Jitter 2.7-GHz Injection-Locked PLL Featuring Synchronized Injection and Frequency Tracking in 28-nm CMOS

This letter presents a low-jitter ring voltage-controlled oscillator (RVCO) based injection-locked phase-locked loop (ILPLL). In particular, the proposed ILPLL features synchronized injection and frequency tracking to address the phase and slew-rate mismatch in conventional ILPLLs, which intrinsically facilitates the alignment of the free-running and injected edges without additional area-intensive background phase calibration. Fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS process, the ILPLL achieves an rms jitter of 161.9fs (integrated from 10kHz to 40MHz) and a reference spur of −60.2dBc at a 2.7GHz carrier frequency. The power consumption is 9.36mW from a 0.9-V supply corresponding to FoM_Jitter of −246.1dB.