Phase Noise of Pulse Injection-Locked Oscillators

Sub-harmonic pulse injection-locked oscillators are becoming attractive candidates for the design of clock multipliers and as building blocks of phase-locked loops. Unfortunately, due to the large amplitude of the injected signals, these circuits cannot be analyzed with conventional methods and very-time-consuming simulations are needed to determine their phase noise performance. Phase-noise simulations are particularly critical when the ratio N between the output and the injection frequency gets large. To address the above issue, this paper provides an efficient computation flow to derive the phase noise of pulse injection-locked oscillators. The flow simply requires the computation of the phase-domain response and the phase noise of the free-running oscillator. An analytical expression, herewith demonstrated and compared against commercial simulation tools, allows calculating the phase noise of the injection-locked oscillator for any frequency ratio N.