Tutorial: Low-Jitter PLLs for Wireless Transceivers

PLLs and frequency synthesizers are key building blocks in wireless transceivers. With the trend of higher data-rate, higher carrier frequency and higher order of modulation, the jitter or phase noise requirement becomes more demanding given a limited power budget. This tutorial starts from the fundamentals of PLL jitter and power consumption. Various sources of PLL jitter and power will be identified and analyzed, and design methodologies to optimize them on both the block and system level will be presented. Finally, the working principle and recent advances of the low jitter sub-sampling PLL architecture will be discussed.