A six‐phase divide‐by‐3 injection locked frequency divider in SiGe BiCMOS technology

This article presents a six‐phase silicon‐germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor divide‐by‐3 injection locked frequency divider (ILFD). The ILFD is based on a three‐stage differential ring oscillator (voltage controlled oscillators) and was fabricated in the 0.35 μm SiGe 3P3M BiCMOS technology. The divide‐by‐3 function is performed by injecting a differential signal to the common gates of injection MOSFETs with the drain/sources connected to the VCO outputs. Measurement results show that when the supply voltage V dd is tuned from 1.4 V to 2 V, the divider free‐running oscillation frequency is tunable from 6.2 GHz to 3.58 GHz, and at the incident power of 0 dBm the operation locking range is about 8.3 GHz, from the incident frequency 18.8 to 10.5 GHz. The core power consumption is 8.96 mW at V dd = 1.4 V. The die area is 0.802 × 0.812 mm 2 . © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 51: 1555–1557, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.24345