Surpassing Tradeoffs by Separation: Examples in Frequency Generation Circuits

Abstract

We review three examples (two PLLs [Crowley, 1979; Woo et al.] and one on-chip transmission-line resonator [Andress and Ham, 2005] ) of design tradeoffs which can in fact be circumvented; the key in each case is that the parameters that seem to trade off with each other are actually separated in time or space. This paper is an attempt to present these designs in such a way that this common approach can hopefully be applied to other circuits.