20 Gb/s referenceless quarter-rate PLL-based clock data recovery circuit in 130 nm CMOS technology

This paper describes the design and transistor level simulation of a novel architecture of PLL-based clock and data recovery (PLL-CDR) circuit. The proposed PLL-CDR is a referenceless quarter-rate design that receives data at 20 Gb/s rate whereas its internal circuits work at 5 GHz frequency rate. This proposed architecture utilizes a quarter-rate early-late type phase detector (ELPD), a quarter-rate digital quadricorrelator frequency detector (DQFD) and a quarter-rate ring type voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). The simulation results at 20 Gb/s data rate show that the quarter-rate PLL-based CDR is a functional concept. The suggested chip design is realized in UMC 130 nm CMOS technology and occupies an area of 920μm x 315μm. The circuit’s power dissipation excluding the output buffers is about 97 mW at a supply voltage of 1.2V according to the transistor level simulation results.