A 16-to-18GHz 0.18-m Epi-CMOS Divide-by-3 Injection-Locked Frequency Divider

A new injection-locked frequency divider (ILFD) topology is proposed for divide-by-odd-number operation. An 18 GHz divide-by-3 prototype is implemented using 0.18μm standard digital CMOS with low-resistivity substrate. It achieves 1 GHz locking range with 3.4dBm injection power, which increases to 3.2GHz with built-in tuning. The phase noise is close to theoretical value of 9.5dB down from input