Dual channel injection-locked quadrature LO generation for a 4GHz instantaneous bandwidth receiver at 21GHz center frequency

This paper presents an LO generation scheme for a 21GHz center-frequency, 4GHz instantaneous bandwidth channelized receiver. A single 1.33GHz reference source is used to simultaneously generate 20GHz and 22GHz LOs with quadrature outputs. Injection locking is used instead of conventional PLL techniques allowing low-power quadrature generation. A harmonic-rich signal, containing both even and odd harmonics of the input reference signal, is generated using a digital pulse slimmer. Two ILO chains are used to lock on to the 10^th and 11^th harmonics of the reference signal generating the 20GHz and the 22GHz quadrature LOs respectively. The prototype design is implemented in IBM´s 130nm CMOS process, draws 125mA from a 1.2V supply and occupies an active area of 1.8mm².