1.56 GHz On-chip Resonant Clocking in 130nm CMOS

Abstract

This paper describes a successful experiment of 1.56-GHz on-chip LC-tank resonant clock oscillator, which directly drives 2times896 flip-flops, without intermediate buffers. Detailed power measurements of a test-chip in 130-nm CMOS technology show that the proposed resonant clocking technique results in 57 % lower clock power and 15-30 % lower total chip power compared to the conventional clocking strategy implemented on the same chip. Furthermore, clock jitter measurements show a worst-case peak-to-peak jitter of 28.4 ps (or 14.5 ps using injection locking) across 0-to-80 % data activity in flip-flops and the data-path logic