K-band digitally controlled oscillator with integrated divide-by-16 divider chain for ADPLL applications

This paper presents the design and measurements of a differential K-band digitally-controlled oscillator (DCO) utilizing a tunable-dielectric resonator structure with an integrated divide-by-16 divider chain for use in an all-digital phase locked loop. The prototype differential oscillator exhibits 256 digitally-controlled states with the LSB corresponding to ~700 kHz of frequency tuning. At a 1 MHz offset, the simulated divider output phase noise is -104 dBc/Hz. The divider chain includes four divide-by-two stages in series for a final division ratio of 16. To our knowledge, this is the first published tunable-dielectric DCO and divider chain integrated onto a single chip and implemented in a SiGe BiCMOS process.