• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.65-74
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• 2010

The Digital TV(DTV) standard has ushered in a new era in TV broadcasting and raised a great demand for DTV tuners. There are many challenges in designing a DTV tuner, of which the most difficult part is the frequency synthesizer. This paper presents the design of a frequency synthesizer for DTV Tuners in a $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS process. It satisfies the DTV(ATSC) frequency band(54~806MHz). A scheme is proposed to cover the full band using only one VCO. The VCO has been designed to operate at 1.6~3.6GHz band such that the LO pulling effect is minimized, and reliable broadband characteristics have been achieved by reducing the variations of VCO gain and frequency step. The simulation results show that the designed VCO has gains of 59~94MHz(${\pm}$17.7MHz/V,${\pm}$23%) and frequency steps of 26~42.5MHz(${\pm}$8.25MHz/V,${\pm}$24%), and a very wide tuning range of 76.9%. The designed frequency synthesizer has a phase noise of -106dBc/Hz at 100kHz offset, and the lock time is less than $10{\mu}$sec. It consumes 20~23mA from a 1.8V supply, and the chip size including PADs is 2.0mm${\times}$1.8mm.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.40-49
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• 2008

A Frequency synthesizer for mobile-DTV applications is implemented using $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS process with 1.8V supply. PMOS transistors are chosen for VCO core to reduce phase noise. The measurement result of VCO frequency range is 800MHz-1.67GHz using switchable inductors, capacitors and varactors. We use varactor bias technique for the improvement of VCO gain linearity, and the number of varactor biasing are minimized as two. VCO gain deterioration is also improved by using the varactor switching technique. The VCO gain and interval of VCO gain are maintained as low and improved using the VCO frequency calibration block. The sigma-delta modulator for fractional divider is designed by the co-simualtion method for accuracy and efficiency improvement. The VCO, PFD, CP and LF are verified by Cadence Spectre, and the sigma-delta modulator is simulated using Matlab Simulink, ModelSim and HSPICE. The power consumption of the frequency synthesizer is 18mW, and the VCO has 52.1% tuning range according to the VCO maximum output frequency. The VCO phase noise is lower than -100dBc/Hz at 1MHz at 1MHz offset for 1GHz, 1.5GHz, and 2GHz output frequencies.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.40 no.8
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• pp.598-609
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• 2003

This paper describes a CMOS IF PLL frequency synthesizer. The designed frequency synthesizer can be programmed to operate at various intermediate frequencies using different external LC-tanks. The VCO with automatic amplitude control provides constant output power independent of the Q-factor of the external LC-tank. The designed frequency divider includes an 8/9 or 16/17 dual-modulus prescaler and can be programmed to operate at different frequencies by external serial data for various applications. The designed circuit is fabricated using a 0.35${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$ n-well CMOS process. Measurement results show that the phase noise is 114dBc/Hz@100kHz and the lock time is less than 300$mutextrm{s}$. It consumes 16mW from 3V supply. The die area is 730${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$$\times$950${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.845-848
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• 2005

This paper describes a 4.224GHz CMOS charge pump PLL for Mode 1 MB-OFDM UWB hopping carrier generation. It includes a qudrature VCO of which the frequency range is from 3.98GHz to 4.47GHz(@ 0.4 to 1.5 V), a divider, a PFD, a loop filter, a charge pump, and a lock detector. Designed in a 0.18um CMOS technology, the PLL draws 6.6mA from a 1.8V supply. The phase noise of the designed VCO is -133dBc/Hz@3MHz.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07b
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• pp.1185-1188
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• 2003

This paper describes a design for a 2.5Gb/s serial data link CMOS transceiver based on the InfiniBand$^{TM}$ specification. The transceiver chip integrates data serializer, line driver, Tx PLL, deserializer, clock recovery, and lock detector. The designed transceiver is fabricated in a 0.25 ${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$ CMOS mixed-signal, 1-poly, 5-metal process. The first version chip occupies a 3.0mm x 3.3mm area and consumes 450mW with 2.5V supply. In 2.5 Gbps, the output jitter of transmitter measured at the point over a 1.2m, 50Ω coaxial cable is 8.811ps(rms), 68ps(p-p). In the receiver, VCO jitter is 18.5ps(rms), 130ps(p-p), the recovered data are found equivalent to the transmitted data as expected. In the design for second version chip, the proposed clock and data recovery circuit using linear phase detector can reduce jitter in the VCO of PLL.L.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.44 no.7 s.361
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• pp.7-11
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• 2007

This paper presents a multiband octa-phase LC VCO for SDR receiver. Four identical LC VCOs are connected by using series coupling transistor to obtain the octa-phase signal and low phase noise characteristic. For a multiband application, a band tuning circuit that consists of a switch capacitor circuit and two MOS varactors is proposed. As the MOS switch is on/off state, the frequency range will be varied. In addition, two varactors make the VCO be immune to process variation of the oscillation frequency. The VCO is designed in 0.18-um CMOS technology, consumes 12mA current from 1.8V supply voltage and operates with a frequency band from 885MHz to 1.342GHz (41% tuning range). As driving sub-harmonic mixer, the proposed VCO covers 3 standards(CDMA 2000 1x, WCDMA, WiBro). The measured phase noise is -105dBc@100kHz, -115dBc@1MHz, -130dBc@10MHz for CDMA 2000 1x, WCDMA, WiBro respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.39 no.5
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• pp.8-15
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• 2002

We optimally designed the VCO(voltage-controlled oscillator) with spiral inductor using the MOSIS HP 0.5${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$ CMOS process. With the developed SPICE model of spiral inductor, the quality factor of spiral inductor was maximized at the operating frequency by varying the layout parameters, e.g., metal width, number of turns, radius, space of the metal lines. For the operation frequency of 2㎓, the inductance of about 3nH, and the MOSIS HP 0.5 CMOS process with the metal thickness of 0.8${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$, oxide thickness of 3${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$, the optimal width of metal lines is about 20${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$ for the maximum Quality factor. With the optimized spiral inductor, the VCO with LC tuning tank was designed, fabricated and measured. The measurements were peformed on-wafer using the HP8593E spectrum analyzer. The oscillation frequency was about 1.610Hz, the frequency variation of 250MHz(15%) with control voltage of 0V - 2V, and the phase noise of -108.4㏈c(@600KHz) from output spectrum.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.27 no.8
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• pp.717-724
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• 2016

This paper presents design of a 40 GHz CMOS PLL frequency synthesizer for a 60 GHz sliding-IF RF transceiver. For stable locking over a wide bandwith for a injection-locked frequency divider, an inductive-peaking technique is employed so that it ensures the PLL can safely lock across the very wide tuning range of the VCO. Also, Injection-locked type LC-buffer with low-phase noise and low-power consumption is added in between the VCO and ILFD so that it can block any undesirable interaction and performance degradation between VCO and ILFD. The PLL is designed in 65 nm CMOS precess. It covers from 37.9 to 45.3 GHz of the output frequency. and its power consumption is 74 mA from 1.2 V power supply.

• Journal of electromagnetic engineering and science
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.134-137
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• 2008

This paper proposes a novel quadrature VCO(QVCO) based on direct back-gate second harmonic coupling. The QVCO directly couples the current sources of the conventional LC VCOs through the back-gate instead of front-gate to generate quadrature signals. By the second harmonic injection locking, the two LC VCOs can generate quadrature signals without using on-chip transformer, or stability problem that is inherent in the direct front-gate second harmonic coupling. The proposed QVCO is implemented in $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS technology operating at 2 GHz with 5.0 mA core current consumption from 1.8 V power supply. The measured phase noise of the proposed QVCO is - 63 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz offset, -95 dBc/Hz at 100 kHz offset, and -116 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset from the 2 GHz output frequency, respectively. The calculated figure of merit(FOM) is about -174 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset. The measured image band rejection is 46 dB which corresponds to the phase error of $0.6^{\circ}$.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.534-542
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• 2017

This paper presents a fast locking technique for a fractional-N PLL frequency synthesizer. The technique directly measures $K_{VCO}$ on a chip, computes the VCO's target tuning voltage for a given target frequency, and directly sets the loop filter voltage to the target voltage before the PLL begins the normal closed-loop locking process. The closed-loop lock time is significantly minimized because the initial frequency of the VCO are put very close to the desired final target value. The proposed technique is realized and designed for a 4.3-5.3 GHz fractional-N synthesizer in 65 nm CMOS and successfully verified through extensive simulations. The lock time is less than $12.8{\mu}s$ over the entire tuning range. Simulation verifications demonstrate that the proposed method is very effective in reducing the synthesizer lock time.