Wide-Locking Range Divide-by-4 Injection-Locked Frequency Divider Using Linear Mixer Approach

A novel divide-by-4 injection-locked frequency divider (ILFD) is proposed and was implemented in the TSMC $0.18~\mu \text{m}$ 1P6M CMOS process. Conventional harmonic mixer divide-by-4 ILFD has limited locking range, and this letter shows a wide locking range divide-by-4 ILFD designed with linear mixer technique. At the drain–source bias of 1 V and at the incident power of 0 dBm, the locking range is 3.9 GHz (36.28%) from 8.8 to 12.7 GHz at the power consumption of 3.61 mW. The free-running oscillation frequency is 2.6 GHz. The proposed ILFD is based on a cross-coupled voltage-controlled oscillator.