Current students

BUCCOLERI FRANCESCO

Cycle: XXXV

Section: Electronics
Advisor: LACAITA ANDREA LEONARDO
Tutor: SOTTOCORNOLA SPINELLI ALESSANDRO

Major Research topic:
Analysis and design of low-noise Digital Controlled Oscillator in 28nm CMOS technology

Abstract:

The Digital Controlled Oscillator (DCO) is a key building block in high performance communication systems being the bottleneck for jitter minimization in modern frequency synthesizers. For this reason, in the last decades DCO research had attracted a great interest aiming at understanding the detailed conversion mechanisms of each noise source. Nowadays, the origin of the white noise contributions to the phase are well known. On the other hand, even if flicker noise gives a significant contribution to the total jitter, a complete understanding of the up-conversion mechanisms into phase noise is still missing. Moreover, the physical limitation on frequency resolution of practical DCO burdens the out-of-band performances of the frequency synthesizer due to the large quantization noise.

The aim of this Ph.D. project is twofold: (i) to investigate further the flicker up-conversion phenomena in DCOs providing a formal background to some of the flicker noise minimization technique qualitatively proposed in literature. Based on the theoretical results, some novel flicker noise reduction techniques may be introduced, thus improving the state of the art. (ii) to circumvent the limitation on the frequency resolution of practical DCOs investigating system level approaches to suppress the DCO quantization noise of the frequency synthesizer. ;

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