Design Study of a Frequency Divider Using Injection Locking Technique for RF Communication Transceiver

The increasing variety of radio standards utilized by modern mobile devices necessitates that these devices handle numerous frequency bands. As the frequency range increases, the support for multiple bands creates design issues for frequency synthesizers. The increased frequency range provides the benefit of broader bandwidth and smaller antennas that require less space. An existing frequency synthesizer's performance and range can be enhanced by including frequency dividers. Injection-locked frequency dividers (ILFD) receive the most attention among other frequency dividers due to their better phase noise performance and low-power at high frequencies. This paper presents a divide-by-2 Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) LC-ILFD with a wide locking range percentage and low power. The proposed CMOS LC-ILFD uses sinusoidal tail current-shaping and cross-coupled topology to reduce phase noise and power consumption. At an injection power of 0 dBm and an injection voltage of 0.6 V, the proposed ILFD has an input frequency locking range of 3.8 GHz to 6.5 GHz (52.43%). Aside from that, the proposed ILFD had a phase noise of -125.97 dBc/Hz at a noise frequency of 1 MHz. The proposed ILFD was realized in 180 nm CMOS process with ADS software and had a power dissipation of 1 mW at a 1V DC supply.