A 2.5-5.75-GHz Ring-Based Injection-Locked Clock Multiplier with Background-Calibrated Reference Frequency Doubler

A low-jitter, low-power ring oscillator (RO)-based injection-locked clock multiplier (ILCM) is presented. It employs a background-calibrated reference frequency doubler to increase the RO noise suppression bandwidth, a digital delay-locked loop (DLL) to achieve second-order suppression of RO noise, and a digital frequency-tracking loop (FTL) to continuously tune the oscillator's free-running frequency and ensure a robust operation across process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations. A least-mean-square (LMS) algorithm is used to accurately cancel the deterministic jitter (DJ) caused by input duty cycle errors. Fabricated in the 65-nm CMOS process, the prototype ILCM occupies an active area of 0.09 mm² and generates an output clock in the range of 2.5-5.75 GHz using a 125-MHz reference clock. At 5 GHz, it achieves an integrated jitter of 335 fs_rms, while consuming 5.3 mW of power. This translates to the best reported figure-of-merit (FoM) of -242.4 dB for a ring-based ILCM at this high frequency.