Observer-Controller Digital PLL

A digital phase-locked loop (DPLL) has been recently developed to exploit the increasing transistor speed of modern process technology. By employing a digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) and a time-to-digital converter (TDC), the loop filter of a DPLL becomes all-digital. Instead of designing the loop filter by digitizing a continuous-time loop response as has been commonly done, more sophisticated control schemes can be employed. In this paper, we propose to design the feedback loop in the time-domain by first modeling the DCO and TDC as a noisy ¿plant¿ in state-space form. Based on a Kalman observer of the ¿plant,¿ the proposed approach then generates optimal control signals that accurately account for the additive noise as well as the transport delay in the digital feedback system. The proposed observer-controller loop filter achieves rapid transient response time and significantly reduces the steady-state phase noise jitter compared to the conventional DPLL. Furthermore, the proposed approach enables modeling of other noise sources such as due to oscillator pulling, which is a common problem in many modern transceivers. By employing the observer-controller loop filter, the effect of oscillator pulling can be effectively removed without degrading the overall phase noise performance.