Design of a Time-to-Digital Converter for an All-Digital Phase Locked Loop for the 2-GHz Band

Sammanfattning: An all-digital phase locked loop for WiGig systems was implemented. The developedall-digital phase locked loop has a targeted frequency range of 2.1-GHz to2.5-GHz. The all-digital phase locked loop replaces the traditional charge pumpbased analog phase locked loop. The digital nature of the all-digital phase lockedloop system makes it superior to the analog counterpart.There are four main partswhich constitutes the all-digital phase locked loop. The time-to-digital converteris one of the important block in all-digital phase locked loop. Several time-to-digital converter architectures were studied and simulated. TheVernier delay based architecture and inverter delay based architecture was designedand evaluated. There architectures provided certain short comings whilethe pseudo-differential time-to-digital converter architecture was chosen, becauseof it’s less occupation of area. Since there exists a relationship between the sizeof the delay cells and it’s time resolution, the pseudo-differential time-to-digitalconverter severed it’s purpose. The whole time-to-digital converter system was tested on a 1 V power supply,reference frequency 54-MHz which is also the reference clock Fref , and a feedbackfrequency Fckv 2.1-GHz. The power consumption was found to be around 2.78mW without dynamic clock gating. When the clock gating or bypassing is done,the power consumption is expected to be reduced considerably. The measuredtime-to-digital converter resolution is around 7 ps to 9 ps with a load variation of15 fF. The inherent delay was also found to be 5 ps. The total output noise powerwas found to be -128 dBm.