Low Power Clock Generator Design With CMOS Signaling

The requirements for computing with higher energy efficiency in the datacenter and for longer battery life in laptop computers, cell phones, and other IoT devices while increasing performance with higher frequency and more cores, drive the needs for more clock generators with increased performance (frequency and jitter) and lower power budgets. The traditional current mode low swing clock generators were used widely in industry about 10 years ago. Although it had the advantage of higher supply noise rejection due to the differential nature of the architectures, however, it had the disadvantages of high-power consumption, large layout area, and not friendly to process scaling. Contrary to current mode low swing design, clock generator architectures with CMOS large swing signaling, which have advantages of low power consumption, small area, and based on circuits friendly to process scaling, have been widely adopted for clocking generation in the industry since 2009. In this paper, phase locked loops, delay locked loops, phase interpolators, high resolution digital to time converter and clock distribution techniques with CMOS large swing signaling will be discussed and reviewed.