Pulse Ring Oscillator Tuning via Pulse Dynamics

This paper presents a practical method for improving timing uncertainty due to thermal noise in a ring oscillator. The methodology utilizes delay elements with non-linear behavior dependent on event separation, the period between successive events. Pulse logic gates are shown to have delay-separation dynamics which can impact the statistics of subsequent events in the oscillators. The slope of the delay-separation is shown to linearly improve the uncertainty in these oscillators. Multiple pulses in a ring is also shown to linearly improve the timing uncertainty.