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Abstract

This work presents the design and measurement results of two injection-locked frequency dividers (ILFDs) that are intended for mm-wave applications. The two prototypes are fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process. The first direct-injection ILFD achieves a measured locking range of 24.5 GHz to 43 GHz while consuming 1.3 mW from a 0.48-V supply with a 0 dBm input injection power. The second ILFD design is based on the dual-injection multi-band architecture and as compared to the first design enhances the locking range by a factor of 2. The dual-injection ILFD achieves a locking range of 18 GHz to 61 GHz while consuming 1.8 mW from a 0.5-V supply with a 0 dBm input injection power. The design is optimized to improve the locking range and avoid in-band loss of lock which is a drawback of transformer-based higher order ILFDs. Furthermore, techniques such as shunt inductor peaking to reduce power consumption and dual-injection of the input signal through a distributed multi-order resonator to improve the locking range are explored and discussed. The best achieved locking range is 108.8 % at 39.5 GHz. The locking range obtained makes the divider suitable for integration in a multi-band mm-wave frequency synthesizer that can support international roaming.