A subharmonically injection-locked PLL with 130 fs RMS jitter at 24 GHz using synchronous reference pulse injection from nonlinear VCO envelope feedback

This paper presents an 8 GHz subharmonically injection-locked PLL (SILPLL), which is cascaded with a 24 GHz quadrature injection-locked oscillator in 130 nm CMOS. The proposed SILPLL adopts an envelope-detection based injection-timing calibration for synchronous reference pulse injection to a VCO. With one of the largest frequency division ratios (N=80) reported so far, the SILPLL exhibits 124 fs and 130 fs RMS jitter at 8 GHz and 24 GHz, respectively, with <;-49 dBc reference spur. The measured phase noise at 1 MHz offset is -114 dBc/Hz at 8 GHz and -104 dBc/Hz at 24 GHz.