Wide-Locking Range Divide-by-3 Injection-Locked Frequency Divider Through Enhanced 2nd Harmonic

Conventional harmonic mixer divide-by-3 ILFD has limited locking range. This letter shows a wide locking range ÷3 ILFD designed with the enhanced 2nd harmonic technique. The proposed ILFD is based on a cross-coupled voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) and was implemented in the TSMC 0.18μm 1P6M CMOS process. At the drain-source bias V
_DD
of 0.8 V and at the incident power of 0 dBm, the locking range is 4 GHz (50%), from the incident frequency 6 GHz to 10 GHz. The core power consumption is 7.72 mW and the die area is 0.939 × 0.885mm
²
.