Time to Digital Converter used in ALL digital PLL

Abstract: This thesis proposes and demonstrates Time to Digital Converters (TDC) with high resolution realized in 65-nm digital CMOS. It is used as a phase detector in all digital PLL working with 5GHz DCO and 20MHz reference input for radio transmitters. Two kinds of high resolution TDC are designed on schematic level including Vernier TDC and parallel TDC. The Sensed Amplifier Flip Flop (SAFF) is implemented with less than 1ps sampling window to avoid metastability. The current starved delay elements are adopted in the TDC and the conversion resolution is equal to the difference of the delay time from these delay elements. Furthermore, the parallel TDC is realized on layout and finally achieves the resolution of 3ps meanwhile it consumes average power 442μW with 1.2V power supply. Measured integral nonlinearity and differential nonlinearity are 0.5LSB and 0.33LSB respectively.