A wide-range multiphase delay-locked loop (DLL) using mixed-mode voltage-controlled delay lines (VCDLs) is presented. An edge-triggered duty cycle corrector is introduced to generate output clocks with 50% duty cycle. This DLL using an analog 3-states phase-frequency detector (PFD) and the proposed digital PFD can achieve low jitter operation over a wide frequency range without harmonic locking problems. It has been fabricated in a standard 0.25-µm CMOS technology and occupies a core area of 1 mm2 including the on-chip regulator and loop filter. For reference clocks from 20 MHz to 550 MHz, all the measured rms and peak-to-peak jitters are below 10 ps and 78 ps, respectively.

A fully integrated clock and data recovery circuit with the proposed gated frequency detector (GFD) is presented. It has been realized in a standard 0.25-µm CMOS technology. The proposed voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) can achieve wide operation range and reasonable conversion gain by employing the analog/digital dual loop architecture. The characteristics of small VCO gain can help to reduce loop bandwidth without enlarge the capacitors and relax the constraint on choosing the loop parameter to reduce the size of the on-chip capacitor. The proposed GFD will make the frequency lock time fixed and can avoid the harmonic locking problem in digital domain for wide data rate operations. All measured BERs are less than 10-12 with the data rate from 1.7 Gbps to 3.125 Gbps.