A power-efficient 14.8-GHz CMOS programmable frequency divider with quadrature outputs in 40-nm CMOS process

This paper presents a power-efficient CMOS frequency divider (FD) with wide-band programmable division ratio and quadrature outputs for high-speed data transmission applications. The proposed FD consists of a power-efficient programmable divider (PD), a complementary volt-age-to-time converter based duty-cycle correction circuit, and a compact quadrature divider (QD). In the chain of PD, a sense-amplifier based dynamic flip-flop is proposed for 2/3 divider cell to achieve high-speed operation with significantly reduced power consumption. In addition, a simple but effective QD based on two pseudo-differential voltage-controlled tri-state inverters, is beneficial for generating precise quadrature output signals. Measurement results in 40-nm CMOS process show that the proposed FD achieves a wide division range from 16 to 254 and operates up to 14.8 GHz while consuming the power of 540.6 μW at 1.1-V supply, and occupying the active area of 0.00267 mm² (114.6 μm × 23.3 μm).