Tutorial: Design Trade-Offs in Digital Intensive PLLs

The tutorial will give a comprehensive overview and provide an intuitive understanding of digital PLLs in spatial domain. Operating principles and limitations of digital PLLs are demonstrated by introducing an architecture-independent model with numerical calculations in the time domain. Various digital PLL architectures, including all-digital and hybrid PLLs are presented, followed by design strategies for building blocks, such as digital loop filters with latency cancellation, numerically-controlled oscillators with suppression of quantization error, digitally-controlled oscillators with all-digital supply regulation and time-to-digital converters with time amplifiers. Finally, all-digital self-calibration techniques and digitally-assisted PLLs are discussed.