Novel on-chip circuit for jitter testing in high-speed PLLs

We propose a novel on-chip circuit to measure the jitter present at the output of phase-locked loops (PLLs) used for generating phase-synchronous, frequency-multiplied clocks. This measure is performed at every period of the PLL reference clock, and a digital output encoded by means of a thermometer code is obtained. Such a digital output is then analyzed in order to confirm on-chip whether or not the jitter is within specifications. Our proposed circuit is able to test PLLs providing an output frequency in the gigahertz range. Compared to alternate techniques, that proposed here requires lower costs in terms of area overhead (requiring an area <12% of the PLLs' area) and circuit complexity, while featuring higher or comparable accuracy and lower or comparable test time.