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Dissertation Defense

Circuits and Techniques for Digital Frequency Synthesizers and Design Automation.

Kyumin Kwon
WHERE:
1303 EECS BuildingMap
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Clock generator circuits have been extensively explored in the area of design automation due to the digital nature of clock signal and early development of all-digital architectures. But prior arts showed limits in two areas: 1) fully automating the design process starting from a user given specification, 2) systematic solution to alleviate the degradation of analog performance due to the automatic routing and noisy ring-oscillator.

First part of this thesis presentation proposes a design automation flow for baseline ADPLL architecture. By combining physics based equation and simulation results, we show a sample efficient modeling method that successfully predicts key metrics of ring-oscillator with high accuracy. The PLL generator outputs a GDS file from input specification within 2 hours, supporting three process nodes.

The second part of this presentation analyzes PLL fractional spur’s impact on Bluetooth low energy (BLE) spectrum and defines spectral mask for PLL. Also, we propose a novel two-step TDC architecture and calibration scheme to overcome the performance limits coming from random routings.

Final part of the presentation proposes an all-digital fractional-N multiplying delay-locked loop that uses reference triggered ring oscillator as a coarse DTC that reduces fine DTC range by 9x while achieving aggressive oscillator noise suppression.

 

Chair: David Wentzloff