International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / M/A-COM, Inc. has previously developed a highly integrated transmitter chip set for wireless telemetry applications for the military L and S band frequencies and the commercial 2.4GHz ISM band. The original chip set is comprised of a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO), a silicon phase locked loop (PLL), and a family of power amplifiers (PA's). Using these components, M/A-COM has produced a miniature IRIG-compliant transmitter module, which has been flight-tested by the U.S. Army’s Hardened Subminiature Telemetry and Sensor System (HSTSS) program. Since the initial offering, several product enhancements have been added. The module performance has been improved by tailoring the VCO specifically for direct frequency modulation applications. In addition to improving noise performance, these enhancements have produced improved modulation linearity, decreased lock time and increased carrier stability. Modulation rates in excess of 10Mbps have been demonstrated. High efficiency power amplifiers operating at 3V have also been added to the family of amplifiers (PAE > 50%). This greatly enhanced efficiency allows higher RF power output while maintaining the same miniature form factor for the transmitter. Further, M/A-COM has added a silicon-on-sapphire PLL to the chip set, which operates at frequencies up to 3.0GHz. This paper details the enhancements to the components within the chip set, and the improvement in performance of the transmitter module. Test data is presented for the transmitter modules and individual components.

Phased array radar systems employ multiple antennas to create a radar beam that can be steered electronically. By manipulating the relative phase values of feeding signals among different antennas, the effective radiation pattern of the array can be synthesized to enhance the main lobe in a desired direction while suppressing the undesired side lobes in other directions. Hence the radar scanning angles can be electronically controlled without employing the bulky mechanical gimbal structure, which can significantly reduce radar system size, weight and power consumption. In recent years, phased array technologies have received great attentions and are explored in developing many new applications, such as smart communication systems, military radars, vehicular radar, etc. Most of these systems are narrow band systems, where the phase delays are realized with narrow band phase shifter circuits. For the impulse ground penetrating radar however, its operating frequency spans an ultrawide bandwidth. Therefore the traditional phase shifters are not applicable due to their narrow band nature. To resolve the issue, in this study, a true time delay approach is explored which can precisely control time delays for the feeding pulse signals among different antennas in the array. In the design, an on chip programmable delay generator is being developed using Global Foundry 0.18 µm 7 HV high voltage CMOS process. The time delay control is realized by designing a programmable phase locked loop (PLL) circuit which can generate true time delays ranging from 100 ps (picoseconds) to 500 ps with the step size of 25 ps. The PLL oscillator's frequency is programmable from 100MHz to 500MHz through two reconfigurable frequency dividers in the feedback loop. As a result, the antenna beam angle can be synthesized to change from 9.59° to 56.4° with a step of 2.75°, and the 3dB beamwidth is 10°. The power consumption of the time delay circuit is very low, where the supply voltage is 1.8V and the average current is as low as 472uA.

As redes de distribuição de sinais de tempo - ou redes de sincronismo - têm a tarefa de distribuir os sinais de fase e freqüência ao longo de relógios geograficamente dispersos. Este tipo de rede é parte integrante de inúmeras aplicações e sistemas em Engenharia, tais como sistemas de comunicação e transmissão de dados, navegação e rastreamento, sistemas de monitoração e controle de processos, etc. Devido ao baixo custo e facilidade de implementação, a topologia mestre-escravo tem sido predominante na implementação das redes. Recentemente, devido ao surgimento das redes sem fio - wireless - de conexões dinâmicas, e ao aumento da freqüência de operação dos circuitos integrados, topologias complexas, tais como as redes mutuamente conectadas e small world têm ganhado importância. Essencialmente cada nó da rede é composto por um PLL - Phase-Locked Loop - cuja função é sincronizar um oscilador local a um sinal de entrada. Devido ao seu comportamentamento não-linear, o PLL apresenta um jitter com o dobro da freqüência de livre curso dos osciladores, prejudicando o desempenho das redes. Dessa forma, este trabalho tem como objetivo o estudo analítico e por simulação das condições que garantam a existência de estados síncronos, e do comportamento do jitter de fase nas redes de sincronismo. São analisadas as topologias mestre-escravo e mutuamente conectada para o PLL analógico clássico. / Network synchronization deals with the problem of distributing time and fre- quency among spatially remote locations. This kind of network is a constituent element of countless aplications and systems in Engineering, such as communication and data transmission systems, navigation and position determination, monitoring and process control systems, etc. Due to its low cost and simplicity, the master-slave architec- ture has been widely used. In the last few years, with the growth of the dynamically connected wireless networks and the rising operational frequencies of the integrated cir- cuits, the study of the mutually connected and small world architectures are becoming relevant. Essentially, each node of a synchronization network is constituted by a PLL - Phase-Locked Loop - circuit that must automatically adjust the phase of a local oscillator to the phase of an incoming signal. Because of its nonlinear behavior the PLL presents a phase jitter with the double of the free running frequency of the oscillators, impairing the network performance. Thus, this work aims to study, both analytically and by simulation, the existence conditions of the synchronous states and the behavior of the double frequency jitter in the synchronization networks. Specifically the One Way Master Slave (OWMS) and Mutually Connected (MC) network architectures for classical analogical PLLs are analyzed.

Complex digital circuits such as microprocessors typically require support circuitry that has traditionally been realized using analog or mixed-signal macros. PLL circuits are used in many integrated applications such as frequency synthesizers and inter-chip communication interfaces. As process technologies advance and grow in complexity, the challenge of maintaining required analog elements and performance for use in circuits such as PLLs grows. Recently, digital PLL (DPLL) has emerged as an alternative to analog PLL to overcome many constraints such as low supply voltage, poor analog transistor behavior, larger area due to integrated capacitor and process variability. However, DPLLs have high deterministic jitter due to quantization noise of time-to-digital converter (TDC) and digitally-controlled oscillator (DCO) and struggle with random jitter of oscillator. In this thesis, hybrid analog/digital proportional/integral control is used to suppress TDC quantization error and digital phase accumulation techniques to mitigate DCO quantization error. VCO phase noise was reduced using an embedded voltage-mode feedback. This feedback loop is implemented by using a switched-C circuit which converts frequency to current. Designed in a 130nm CMOS process, the proposed DPLL generates more than 1GHz output frequency with low input frequency and achieves superior jitter performance compared to conventional DPLL in simulations. / Graduation date: 2013

The use of resonant CMOS frequency dividers with direct injection in frequencysynthesizers has increased in recent years due to their lower power consumptioncompared to conventional digital prescalers. The theoretical and experimentalaspects of these dividers have received great attention. This masters thesis workis a continuation of earlier work, based on the fundamentals of Injection-LockedFrequency Dividers (ILFD’s). The LC CMOS ILFD with direct injection is wellknownfor its divide-by-2 capability. However, it does not divide well by oddnumbers. The goal of this master thesis work is to modify the LC CMOS ILFDwith direct injection so that it can divide equally well by odd and even integers.In this master thesis report, an introduction to the basic concepts behindInjection-Locked frequency dividers is first presented. Some of the previous workand the background of a reference LC CMOS ILFD design are studied. The author,studied the reference design, and the experimental setup used for characterizingit’s locking behavior. The algorithm used to characterize the locking behavior ofthis ILFD are explored to reproduce the results for divide-by-even numbers for theexisting ILFD topology. Using a Spice model these results are also reproduced insimulations.Over the years, numerous ILFD circuit topologies have been proposed, most ofwhich have been optimized for division by even numbers, especially divide-by-2.It has been more difficult to realize division by odd numbers, such as divide-by-3.This master thesis work develops a simple modification to an LC CMOS injectionlocked frequency divider (ILFD) with direct injection, which gives it a wide lockingrange both in the “divide-by-odd number” mode and in the conventional “divideby-even number” regime, thereby opening up applications which require frequencydivision by an odd number. The work presents the circuit architecture, SPICEsimulations and experimental validation.

In this report a phase locked loop (PLL) system for grid voltage phase tracking has been investigated. The grid voltage phase angle contains critical information for connecting a power plant, such as a wave energy converter, to the grid. A synchronous reference frame PLL system with PI-regulator gains calculated with the symmetrical optimum method has been designed and simulations in SIMULINK have been made. For ideal grid conditions the phase angle was tracked fast and accurate. For non-ideal conditions the phase angle was tracked but with less accuracy, due to slow dynamics of the system, but still within acceptable margins. In order to test this system further it has to be implemented in a control system and tested when connected to the grid.

In the current transmission systems, the transmission capacity is still not enough. The information bandwidth of the optical fiber communication system is limited by the optical amplifier bandwidth, and more efficient use of the bandwidth is a very important issue. Therefore, the amplitude and phase shift keying (APSK) is one attractive method of multi-bit per symbol modulation scheme to improve the spectral efficiency, and it can effectively increase the transmission capacity. To improve the capacity and the spectral efficiency, the advanced modulation format is effective, and the coherent detection scheme is also effective. However, an optical phase-locked loop (PLL) to lock the local oscillator (LO) phase and the signal phase required for the homodyne detection is still difficult to realize and it makes the receiver circuit complicated. Using the digital coherent receiver, the optical carrier phase information can be recovered by means of the digital signal processing (DSP), and this scheme enables to eliminate the optical PLL circuit by the phase estimation algorithm through the DSP. The stored data can be offline processed by using the MATLAB program. This master thesis is focusing on studying the transmission performance of the APSK format using the DSP in the digital coherent receiver. 497km transmission experiment has been conducted. Subsequently, the stored data are offline processed by the algorithms of the DSP. Then, the APSK performances between back-to-back and 497km transmission are compared.

A successive approximation register (SAR) circuit is adopted to control the digital delay line in the delay-locked loop (DLL) to achieve very fast locking effect in this proposed thesis. And in order to get low power consumption results, a loop state controller (LSC) is utilized to disable most of circuit. Because it is more easily to design and the advantages of high stability of delay-locked loop (DLL) compared to phase-locked loop (PLL), delay-locked loop (DLL) is more widely used in the adjustment of the clock error in the high frequency situation. This proposed delay locked loop (DLL) is added a register and a multiplexer in the feedback path. And the multiplexer does select which n-bit digital control code shall be read into the delay line; as the loop is locked, the path goes through the register is chosen to enter the sleep state ,and disable part of the circuit to make it into power saving mode. When entering the sleep state, the register provides the fixed input code; the phase error comparator (PEC) will keep tracking whether the frequency changes due to process, voltage, temperature and load (PVTL) variation uninterruptedly. Once there is something changed, the PEC will send a signal to inform the loop state controller (LSC) to enable the circuit from the sleep state, when the clock has to be locked again. And it just has 6 cycles time to relock, the lock range is form 150MHz to 900MHz. The power consuming are 15mW in lock mode and 9mW in sleep mode.

The grid voltage is normally required to avoid transient current of the inverter due to asynchronously grid-paralleling connection. This paper presents a seamless transition method to allow the inverter to connect to the grid at any time with no requirement of the grid voltage. The control of the inverter consists of the droop control and the riding-through control. In the droop-controlled mode, the inverter can connect to the utility and supply power according to its rated capacity. On the other hand, the riding-through mode is proposed to suppress the transient current due to asynchronous paralleling. In this mode, the zero-current control is realized to reduce transient current and a phase-locked loop is designed to correct the angle of the inverter output voltage. In addition, the virtual inductance is implemented to improve transient current resulting from the mode transition back to the droop control mode. Design considerations of the seamless transition method are provided and test results are conducted to verify its effectiveness.

Circuit optimization is extremely important in order to design today's high performance integrated circuits. As systems become more and more complex, traditional optimization techniques are no longer viable due to the complex and simulation intensive nature of the optimization problem. Two examples of such problems include clock mesh skew reduction and optimization of large analog systems, for example Phase locked loops. Mesh-based clock distribution has been employed in many high-performance microprocessor designs due to its favorable properties such as low clock skew and robustness. However, such clock distributions can become quite complex and may consist of hundreds of nonlinear drivers strongly coupled via a large passive network. While the simulation of clock meshes is already very time consuming, tuning such networks under tight performance constraints is an even daunting task. Same is the case with the phase locked loop. Being composed of multiple individual analog blocks, it is an extremely challenging task to optimize the entire system considering all block level trade-offs. In this work, we address these two challenging optimization problems i.e.; clock mesh skew optimization and PLL locking time reduction. The expensive objective function evaluations and difficulty in getting explicit sensitivity information make these problems intractable to standard optimization methods. We propose to explore the recently developed asynchronous parallel pattern search (APPS) method for efficient driver size tuning. While being a search-based method, APPS not only provides the desirable derivative-free optimization capability, but also is amenable to parallelization and possesses appealing theoretically rigorous convergence properties. In this work it is shown how such a method can lead to powerful parallel optimization of these complex problems with significant runtime and quality advantages over the traditional sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method. It is also shown how design-specific properties and speeding-up techniques can be exploited to make the optimization even more efficient while maintaining the convergence of APPS in a practical sense. In addition, the optimization technique is further enhanced by introducing the feature to handle non-linear constraints through the use of penalty functions. The enhanced method is used for optimizing phase locked loops at the system level.