Design Techniques for a Multi-Phase Injection- Based Eight-Phase 17-GHz Clock Generator for Multi-Phase Wireline Receivers

Clock generation for high-speed wireline receivers must provide multiple clock phases with high-resolution rotation. To address this, an 8-phase 17 GHz clock generation circuit with built-in 6b rotation is presented. Multi-phase injection is used to perform reference-side phase rotation to efficiently generate and rotate eight clock phases. The injection method is analyzed with a model to study the introduced nonlinearity, and the effect of the injection strength is discussed. Designed by using BAG3++ for layout-aware design optimization, the proposed circuit achieves 98 fs RMS jitter and a measured DNLpp and INLpp of 1.26 and 4.05 LSB respectively, while consuming 33 mW.