A Miniaturized Low-Power Frequency Synthesizer (Catena)

Ultra-low-power frequency synthesizers are key building blocks for Internet-of-Things (IoT) transceivers, which impose stringent requirements on power consumption and cost (i.e., small silicon area). Recent IoT synthesizers successfully operate below 1mW, however, they employ LC oscillators with area-consuming multi-turn inductors. Ring oscillators (ROs) offer a smaller chip area, but their phase noise is at least 20 dB worse than that of LC oscillators at the same power consumption. Unfortunately, due to the stability issues, the noise tracking bandwidth (NBW) of traditional PLLs is not wide enough to suppress the excessive phase noise of low-power ROs. In this project, we aim to develop an injection-locked ring-oscillator-based frequency synthesizer for IoT applications.

• This project comes with a student stipend!

Contact

dr. Masoud Babaie

Electronic Circuits and Architectures Group

Department of Microelectronics

Last modified: 2020-03-05