PPV-Based Modeling and Event-Driven Simulation of Injection-Locked Oscillators in SystemVerilog

This paper presents an event-driven simulation methodology for injection-locked oscillators. The proposed method adopts a phase-domain macromodel based on a perturbation projection vector (PPV), which expresses the oscillator's phase response using a nonlinear, time-varying differential equation. By expressing the PPV using a piecewise polynomial function, the PPV model can be simulated in an event-driven fashion on a digital logic simulator like SystemVerilog. While this piecewise polynomial approximation introduces a trade-off between the simulation accuracy and speed, our results show that the simulation accuracy quickly reaches its optimal value as the piecewise interval number increases even with first-order polynomials. The experimental results with an LC oscillator, ring oscillator, and burst-mode CDR models operating with both periodic and aperiodic inputs demonstrate that the proposed models achieve speeds up to 2 ~ 30× that of transistor-level Spectre simulations with the same accuracy.