The design of a clock data recovery (CDR) circuit is the most challenging part of building a high-speed optical transceiver because of the complexity of this block. In this dissertation, the design of a half-rate high speed CDR is described, following a top-down design procedure. VHDL-AMS, which is the acronym of the VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language) for Analog and Mixed-Signal, is used to implement the behavioral model of the whole system in the early and mid-stage of the design process.As both wireless and optical communications systems move towards high-data rate application, low noise high frequency voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) are becoming more important in the design of the receiver and transmitter blocks. Ring oscillator has long been perceived as capable of permitting easy implementation and occupying smaller die area as compared with its inductor-capacitor (LC) counterparts. Ring oscillator is also well known to be able to cover a wide tuning range, and to generate quadrature signals, by simply using even-number of differential delay stages.In this dissertation, the design and experimental results of two novel ring oscillators are described. One of the proposed VCO attains the high speed and wide tuning range with acceptable noise level by using push-pull inverter as the secondary input of the multipleloop ring oscillator. Experimental results prove the capability of the VCO to operate at i ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to the use of this document. Nanyang Technological University Library high frequencies. Implemented in 0.18-/im CMOS process, the oscillator presents a tuning range of 6.3 to 7 GHz with a relatively constant tuning gain across the whole tuning range.The other proposed VCO achieves low-noise, low voltage tuning gain without impairing the wide tuning range by utilizing coarse/fine-tuning technique. The frequency and phase noise performance of the coarse/fine-tuning oscillator are analyzed in detail. The analysis is also verified by the physical implementation. The fabricated oscillator in 0.13-/xm technology is measured to cover a frequency range of 7.3 to 7.9 GHz, and exhibits a typical phase noise of-103.4 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz from 7.64 GHz center frequency.By modifying the proposed ring oscillator from three stages to four stages, in-phase and quadrature (IQ) clock signals are obtained to be used in the half-rate CDR circuit. A half-rate bang-bang phase detector is used for higher speed data processing as well as to avoid the marginal performance of the full-rate 10-Gb/s CDR system implemented in 0.18-/zm CMOS technology. Since the lock-in range of data-tracking loop in CDR system is very limited while the VCO usually has a wide tuning range to accommodate the process drift, the frequency-locked loop is usually necessary to extend the lock-in range of the CDR system. An analog lock detector is designed for use in the CDR which employs frequencylocked loop. The post-layout simulation of the CDR indicates that the design can operate at input data rate of 13-18...