Spur Reduction Techniques for Phase-Locked Loops Exploiting A Sub-Sampling Phase Detector
Summary (3 min read)
Introduction
- They did not lead to a low spur level there.
- Section V presents the experimental results andSection VI gives conclusions.
A. Conventional CP
- In PLL designs, the phase frequency detector (PFD) and CP as shown in Fig. 2(a) is often used.
- During operation, the PFD compares the phase of the divided-down VCO to the phase of Ref and generates two signals UP and DN to control the CP.
- To maintain the steady-state locking condition, the following equation must be satisfied: (1) In case there is mismatch between the amplitudes of and , the authors have and .
- This causes CP output current ripple as shown in Fig. 2(a), which is then converted to ripple on the VCO control voltage by the LF.
- When the oftenused second-order RC filter as in Fig. 2(b) is used, the authors have (3) where and are the LF zero and pole frequencies.
B. Low Spur CP Using Sub-Sampling
- This Pulser controls the CP gain and also functions as the slave track-and-hold for the VCO sampling.
- Assuming ideal switching, the following equation must be satisfied to meet the steady-state locking condition of zero net CP output charge: (7) In other words, and must have equal amplitude and the and mismatch is eliminated in this CP.1.
- Since and mismatch will be tuned out by the PLL loop, the current sources’ output impedance is not an issue and single transistors are used, which saves voltage headroom.
- In practice, there is also mismatch between the switches.
III. SPUR DUE TO VCO SAMPLING AND TECHNIQUES TO REDUCE IT
- In the previous section, the authors have shown that the amplitudecontrolled CP in the SSPLL is inherently insensitive to mismatch and produces small ripple.
- A rather poor 46 dBc reference spur was measured.
- Research shows that this is because the SSPD disturbs the VCO operation, via periodically changing the VCO capacitive load, charge injection from the sampling switch to the VCO and charge sharing between the VCO tank and the sampling capacitor.
- In the sub-sections below, the authors will analyze these VCO sampling spur mechanisms and propose techniques to suppress them.
- To simplify the analysis and gain insights, the authors will firstly ignore the buffer and discuss the effect of the buffer later.
A. BFSK Effect
- For an ideal sampler, the sampling clock should be a Dirac pulse with an infinitesimal duration time.
- When Ref turns on the switch, the sampling capacitor is connected to the VCO and becomes part of the VCO loading.
- Therefore, the periodic switching of the sampler at frequency modulates in a way similar to the case of binary frequency shift keying (BFSK) as shown in Fig. 4(a).
- Equation (8) indicates that the BFSK effect induced reference spur varies with , which is used here to verify whether it is the dominant spur source.
- The shape matches well with the simulated .
B. Charge Sharing/Injection
- Apart from the BFSK effect, the VCO sampling activity also brings two other mechanisms which disturb the VCO operation, namely charge injection from the sampling switches to the VCO and charge sharing between the VCO and .
- While the former can be canceled by adding dummy switches[6], [7], the latter needs more effort to deal with.
- In contrast, the voltage on the VCO tank capacitor at the switch-on moment depends on the position of the Ref tracking edge which is ill-defined.
- When the Ref tracking edge occurs at the VCO peaks as shown in Fig. 6(b), the authors have and maximum charge sharing.
- It is worth noting that, in contrast to the case with the CP, all the aforementioned SSPD spur mechanisms disturb the VCO without going through the PLL loop filter.
C. Low Spur PLL Architecture
- For the SSPLL, the timing of the Ref sampling edge is highly critical 2It is determined by the distance between the two Ref edges, i.e., determined by the Ref duty cycle which is uncontrolled at this stage.
- The Ref falling edge can then be tuned by tuning , without affecting the Ref rising edge.
- Moreover, the SSPD/CP in the SSDLL acts as a dummy for the SSPD/CP in the SSPLL which compensates the BFSK effect and cancels the charge injection from the sampling switches to the VCO.
- Practical buffers have limited isolation due to e.g., parasitic capacitors.
- The SSPD will still disturb the VCO via parasitic paths and the insights developed for SSPD spur mechanisms in the case of no buffer remain useful design guidelines.
C. SSDLL
- The tunable delay cell is implemented with a current starved inverter and its tuning range is designed to cover one VCO period with margin, which is enough for the SSDLL to align the Ref falling edge with a VCO zero-crossing.
- The rest of the Ref buffer has been shown in Fig. 7.
D. Settling Behavior
- The overall architecture in Fig. 8 includes multiple loops: a SSPLL core loop, a FLL for frequency locking which consists of a divider, and a three-state PFD/CP with a built-in dead zone (DZ) [9], and a SSDLL for Ref duty cycle tuning.
- Since the SSDLL only tunes the Ref tracking edge, it will not affect the loop dynamics of the SSPLL.
- Fig. 12 shows the transient simulation results for the overall system.
- The CP in the FLL thus injects no current into the loop filter.
- Since there is still a frequency error, the phase error keeps accumulating until it becomes larger than and falls outside the DZ.
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
- All circuitry uses a 1.8 V battery supply, while separate supply domains provide isolation.
- According to the noise summary in Spectre RF Noise simulations, the reference clock (XO and buffer), the SSPD and its buffer, and the rest of the circuits contribute 30%, 55%, and 15% to the in-band phase noise at 200 kHz, respectively.
- The charge injection/sharing now happens twice every Ref period.
- To investigate the effect of the SSDLL on the spur level, the VCO spurs have been measured with the SSDLL enabled and disabled while tuning the position of the Ref falling edge via changing .
- Table I summarizes the PLL performance and displays a comparison with other low-spur PLLs.
VI. CONCLUSION
- Design techniques to reduce the PLL reference spur have been proposed.
- By exploiting sub-sampling phase detection, the CP can be amplitude controlled and insensitive to mismatch.
- With the CP ripple reduced, the main source of VCO spur is the SSPD sampler which periodically disturbs the VCO operation via charge injection, charge sharing and frequency modulation due to a change in the VCO capacitive load.
- A duty-cycle-controlled reference buffer with DLL tuning is proposed to further reduce the worst case spur level.
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Citations
103 citations
Cites background from "Spur Reduction Techniques for Phase..."
...A VCO buffer is required in order to reduce the kickback effect from the sampler to the VCO [9] and to interface the signal levels between the blocks....
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71 citations
58 citations
Cites methods from "Spur Reduction Techniques for Phase..."
...A source follower is used as a DCO buffer to provide linear conversion near the zero crossing point similar to the approaches in [18] and [28]....
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...However, the DCO buffer is used as an isolation that alleviates its effect to the oscillator as explained in [28]....
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54 citations
Cites background from "Spur Reduction Techniques for Phase..."
...kickback in sub-sampling PD [12] and coupling from reference signal to VCO supply through the ESD circuitry....
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...2The dependence of the reference spur on the interaction between the VCO and SSPD discussed in [12] was also observed in our measurement by changing the size of the inverter-based buffer between the VCO and SSPD....
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...Even with a larger available reference signal, our PLL achieves an inband phase noise comparable to [3], [12]....
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References
356 citations
"Spur Reduction Techniques for Phase..." refers background in this paper
...Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org....
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...We will now first discuss the conventional CP and then the amplitude-controlled CP for the SSPLL, to explain why the latter is beneficial in terms of output current ripple generation....
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