(A) CMOS current re-injected injection locked frequency divider for 60ghz radio

Abstract

This thesis proposes wide locking range injection locked frequency divider (ILFD) in $0.13\mum$ CMOS for 60 GHz PLL. In recent days, customer’s demands for a higher data rate are increasing each year. The maximum data rate of existing wireless communication technology in wireless personal area networks (WPAN) is only in the range of hundreds of megabits per second, completely insufficient for the demand. Therefore a 60 GHz band that is able to communicate in the Gbps range is required. The 60GHz band has a worldwide common unlicensed band of 9GHz, and has a high data rate without permission. The PLL is one of the important blocks among transceiver blocks. Frequency divider is indispensible in the PLL for frequency dividing and for comparing with the reference clock. Especially, the 60GHz frequency divider chain design for 60GHz PLL is challengeable because frequency divider chain requires a high division ratio. There are several millimeter-wave frequency dividers such as ILFD, current mode logic (CML) frequency divider and miller frequency divider. The ILFD has high operating frequency and low DC power consumption because it is based on oscillator. Therefore the ILFD is the most suitable for 60GHz frequency divider among several kinds of millimeter-wave frequency dividers. However ILFD has narrow locking range so the ILFD needs to be improved for the wideband 60GHz applications. The locking range of ILFD is proportional to an injection current and inversely proportional to a DC current. The proposed ILFD is designed with increasing injection current and low DC power in order to wide locking range. The proposed ILFD consist of adding a NMOS transistor to a conventional LC oscillator. The NMOS transistor re-injects injection current so injection current is increased and finally the locking range is increased. An LC oscillator consists of microstrip line inductor and parasitic capacitance and cross-couple transistors are used for generating negative resista...