An On-Chip Relaxation Oscillator in 5-nm FinFET Using a Frequency-Error Feedback Loop

Availability of a reliable ON-chip oscillator can secure a system-on-chip (SoC) against physical clock attacks by enabling applications such as boot-up using ON-chip oscillator and hardware clock monitors. This article proposes a frequency-error feedback (FEF) loop-based relaxation oscillator for such applications. It suppresses the low-frequency noise and improves the time interval error (TIE) without degrading the period jitter. It also stabilizes the oscillator against supply and temperature variations. A 77-MHz oscillator prototype is fabricated in a commercial 5-nm FinFET process. Operating from 0.9-V digital and 1.2-V analog supplies, the prototype consumes a total of 0.84 mW and occupies an area of 0.0152 mm
²
. It achieves a TIE of 3 ns over 10 K cycles which is
$3\times $
better than an oscillator without an FEF loop. Chip samples are picked from four wafer split lots. The worst case frequency variation measured from 16 samples is
$\pm 0.25\%$
across an analog supply change of 1.1–1.35 V, while a variation of
$\pm 0.3\%$
is measured over −40 to
$125 ^\circ \text{C}$
temperature from eight samples.