A 160-GHz Switched Injection-Locked Oscillator for Phase and Amplitude Regenerative Sampling

This letter presents a switched injection-locked oscillator (SILO) operating at 160 GHz. The SILO utilizes positive feedback in a low-gain amplifier stage to achieve high regenerative gain for phase and amplitude information. The circuit is switched off every symbol period before the oscillator reaches its steady oscillation state to prevent the loss of information, then switched on again to receive the next symbol. This provides a viable solution for energy-efficient amplification in millimeter-wave communication systems, and is the fastest reported circuit of its kind. Fabricated in a 0.13-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology (f
_T
= 300 GHz), the chip requires an area of 0.64 mm
²
and provides 18.4 dB of regenerative gain, while consuming only 6.6 mW of dc power in SILO operation, thus outperforming amplifiers in this frequency range in terms of power consumption.