A 16 MHz, 59.2 ppm/°C CMOS DLL-Assisted VCO with Improved Frequency Stability Towards Single Chip Wireless IOT

Abstract

A 16 MHz, highly stable voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) is reported in this paper. The proposed VCO consists of three cross-coupled RC stages, and is fully compatible with standard CMOS process. A positively biased PN junction with negative temperature coefficient is incorporated in the design to compensate frequency drift. In addition, a delay locked loop (DLL) directly following the VCO is utilized to further improve the output stability caused by temperature variations. The designed circuit was implemented using CMOS 0.18 μm technology, and was validated through experiments. Measurement results show that the DLL-assisted VCO output variation across the 25~120°C temperature range is less than 0.56 %, corresponding to 59.2 ppm/°C. It also shows that the output standard deviation of the DLL-assisted VCO is only 6.816 KHz,~16.6 % better compared with the same VCO without DLL's assistance.