A Fast Settling Fractional- $N$ DPLL With Loop-Order Switching

The enhancement in the settling response of frequency synthesizers would open up prospects for new applications such as spread spectra and frequency hopping systems. Toward deriving a methodology for a fast settling response, we present a switched-loop digital phase locked loop (DPLL) incorporating an integral-derivative controller-based subsystem. The dominant features accelerating the settling response with low jitters in this DPLL are: 1) hybrid phase detection with a state machine using differential and double integration filtering effect and 2) a time-interleaved direct digital synthesizer (DDS)-based digital-to-time converter (DTC) with stable-edge sampling. A 5-GHz fractional-N DPLL (FNDPLL) has been implemented in CMOS 65-nm-LL technology with the proposed technique of loop-order switching. The measured results of the implemented FNDPLL highlight that the system is capable of fastest reported frequency settling to ±25-ppm error within 1.5 μs, using a reference clock frequency of 100 MHz. With one-time calibration, the downsampled output of DDS array-based phase interpolator achieves an integral nonlinearity (INL) of 0.25 ps, as a fractional divider in the loop.