Low-Power Wide-Locking-Range Injection-Locked Frequency Triplers Using Fundamental Mixing and 2nd-Harmonic Recycling

Two injection-locked frequency triplers (ILFTs) are designed to achieve ultra-wide locking ranges (LRs) with low power consumption. A fundamental mixing technique together with 2nd-harmonic recycling is proposed to significantly increase the ILFT’s LR without degrading its harmonic generation efficiency. Fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS process, the W-band ILFT<sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> measures an LR of 26% from 68.0 to 88.2 GHz consuming 2.7 mW, while the second ILFT<sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> measures an LR of 80.5% from 11.5 to 27.0 GHz consuming 2.9 mW.