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Radiation Hardened by Design-based Voltage Controlled Oscillator for Low Power Phase Locked Loop Application

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Abstract

A radiation-hardened-by-design (RHBD) current-starved-ring voltage-controlled oscillator (CSR-VCO) design is proposed based on the separation of gate input technique to mitigate single event effects (SEEs) for phase-locked loop (PLL) implementation. A double-exponential (DE) current model is used to analyze the effect of single event transient (SET) at the output of the proposed RHBD CSR-VCO. The proposed RHBD CSR-VCO is implemented in United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) 65 nm CMOS technology and a 71.6% improvement is achieved in phase displacement as compared to conventional VCO. The oscillation frequency of 1.75 GHz is obtained for the proposed RHBD CSR-VCO with a tuning range from 0.40 GHz to 2.23 GHz and power dissipation of 1.368 mW. The proposed RHBD CSR-VCO is protected against radiation with deposited charges up to 1050 fC and achieved a higher figure-of-merit (FOM) when compared to the recently reported VCOs and PLLs. This shows that even in a radiation-prone environment, the RHBD PLL can achieve excellent performance and be employed successfully in low-power, high-speed communication applications.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to Dr. Gaurav Kaushal an assistant professor in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, ABV-IIITM Gwalior for the helpful discussion and also thankful to VLSI research lab, ABV-IIITM Gwalior. The tool used for this work was supported by the SMDP-C2SD project, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Government of India.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ABV-Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, 474015, India

    Rachana Ahirwar, Manisha Pattanaik & Pankaj Srivastava

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  1. Rachana Ahirwar
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  2. Manisha Pattanaik
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  3. Pankaj Srivastava
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Contributions

Rachana Ahirwar: Conception and design, or result analysis, Interpretation of the data, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Prof. Manisha Pattanaik: Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Writing - review & editing. Prof. Pankaj Srivastava: Project administration, Supervision.

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Correspondence to Rachana Ahirwar.

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Ahirwar, R., Pattanaik, M. & Srivastava, P. Radiation Hardened by Design-based Voltage Controlled Oscillator for Low Power Phase Locked Loop Application. J Electron Test (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-024-06113-x

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