A parallel-injection injection locked frequency divider in 0.35-μm SiGe HBT process.

A high operation frequency multimodulus injection locked frequency divider (ILFD) has been proposed and it is based on a cross-coupled voltage-controlled oscillator with the parallel-injection heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs), and was fabricated in the 0.35 μm silicon-germanium (SiGe) 3P3M BiCMOS technology. The die area is 0.82 × 0.748 mm2. The metal-oxide-semicondcutor (MOS) varactor is used to tune the frequency range and operation range. The ILFD has wide divide-by-3 locking range due to the parallel injection HBTs with an inductive boosted source voltage. When the supply voltage VCC is 1.2 V and the tuning voltage of the free-running ILFD is tuned from 0 to 1.2 V, the divider's free-running oscillation frequency is tunable from 6.21 to 7.379 GHz, and at the incident power of 0 dBm the divide-by-3 operation range is 2.7 GHz, continuously from the incident frequency 19.2 to 21.9 GHz. The divide-by-3 locking range is 0.8 GHz, from the incident frequency 20.9 to 21.7 GHz. The divide-by-2 locking range is 0.8 GHz, from the incident frequency 15.2 to 16.0 GHz. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 54:379-383, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.26593 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]