A DCO-Based Configurable Digital Frequency Synthesizer

This paper presents a digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) based on a multiplying delay locked loop (MDLL), and a DCO-based configurable digital frequency synthesizer (DFS) is implemented. The output clock frequency is equal to the reference clock frequency multiplied by M divided by D. The multiplication ratio M and division ratio D can be programmed from 2 to 32, and 1 to 32, respectively. The frequency synthesizer achieves similar jitter performance as conventional MDLL. The DFS is implemented in TSMC 0.13-μm CMOS technology, with a layout area of 480 μm×120 μm. The frequency range of the input and output clock are 1~270 MHz and 15~400 MHz, respectively. The measured phase noise is -110.01 dBc/Hz@1 MHz, when the output clock frequency is 270 MHz.