Wide-Locking Range RLC-Tank Balanced-Injection Divide-by-5 Injection-Locked Frequency Dividers Based on Harmonic Mixing

This article presents and analyzes a wide-locking range divide-by-5 injection-locked frequency divider (ILFD) manufactured in the TSMC 0.18-μm processes. The ILFD uses the balanced injection method and uses the pure harmonic mixing approach at low injection power, and it is designed with an RLC dual-resonance resonator. The harmonic mixer relies on the self-generated second harmonic, which increases with injection power. Because of no narrowband filter as used in the linear mixer counterpart, the divide-by-5 ILFD uses a wideband design method. In addition, the ILFD enhances the divide-by-5 locking range via the overlapped dual-band locking ranges as verified by both experiment and simulation. At the drain-source bias VDD of 0.8 V and at the incident power of 0 dBm, the locking range of the divide-by-5 ILFD is 3.6 GHz, from the incident frequency 13.0-16.6 GHz with the percentage 24.3%. The core power consumption is 4.09 mW, and the die area is 1.02 × 0.93 mm
²
.