Ring-VCO-based phase-locked loops for clock generation–design considerations and state-of-the-art

This article overviews the design considerations and state-of-the-art of the ring voltage-controlled oscillator(VCO)-based phase-locked loops(PLLs)for clock generation in different applications.Partic-ularly,the objective of the current work is to evaluate the required PLL performance among the fundamental metrics of power,jitter and area.An in-depth treatment of the mainstream PLL architectures and the associated design techniques enables them to be compared analyt-ically and benchmarked with respect to their figure-of-merit(FoM).The paper also summarizes the key concerns on the selection of dif-ferent circuit techniques to optimize the clock performance under dif-ferent scenarios.