Clock Generation and Distribution Using Traveling-Wave Oscillators with Reflection and Regeneration

Abstract

We propose a novel traveling-wave oscillator (R2TWO) that uses reflection and regeneration of waves on a transmission line to generate multi-GHz square wave signals. We also propose a scalable, low-power, low-skew and low-jitter clock distribution network by tiling the basic R2TWO s in a regular fashion. Measurement results of a TSMC 0.18mum CMOS test chip show that it can generate and distribute near full-swing 6.5GHz global clock signals with power saving of more than 75% (compared with a traditional ring oscillator). The measured jitter is less than 0.84ps, and the skew less than 1.3ps