Low voltage and low power DLL-based frequency synthesizer for covering VHF frequency band

Abstract

New architecture for a DLL based frequency synthesizer for wireless transceivers presents in this paper. This architecture has the advantages of occupy low area, low power, low voltage and low phase noise. DLLs are first ordered systems, so good stability can obtain in this design. This structure also can be used for generating fractional multiple of reference frequencies. The proposed circuit can operate at a substantially low supply voltage. As an example, the synthesizer is adopted to create the channel frequencies of French DVB-H/T standard. The circuit level and system level designs are presented. Also power consumption trade-offs are reported. It was shown that for the mentioned standard a mere 27 delay stages for VCDL is sufficient. Simulation results confirm the analytical predictions. The proposed DLL-based frequency synthesizer is implemented in a 0.13um CMOS technology.