A Multi-Phase Injection-Locked 8-Phase 17 GHz Clock Generator with 6b Phase Rotation for Multi-Phase Wireline Receivers

A high frequency multi-phase clock generator circuit with a 6b phase rotator is presented for multi-phase wireline receivers. Multi-phase injection is used to efficiently generate and rotate 8 clock phases. Unlike prior rotator-based work, this work does not use time modulation, reducing the resulting deterministic jitter. A model is presented to study the nonlinearity introduced by the technique. The proposed 17 GHz circuit was implemented in the Intel 16 process and consumes 33 mW. The measured RMS jitter is $\mathbf{9 8} \mathrm{fs}$, and the measured DNLpp and INLpp are 1.26 and 4.05 LSB respectively.