A DLL-Based Multi-Clock Generator Having Fast-Relocking and Duty-Cycle Correction Scheme for Low Power and High Speed VLSIs

This paper describes a DLL(delay locked loop)-based multi-clock generator having the lower active stand-by power as well as a fast relocking after re-activating the DLL. for low power and high speed VLSI chip. It enables a frequency multiplication using frequency multiplier scheme and produces output clocks with 50:50 duty-ratio regardless of the duty-ratio of system clock. Also, digital control scheme using DAC enables a fast relocking operation after exiting a standby-mode of the clock system which was obtained by storing analog locking information as digital codes in a register block. Also, for a clock multiplication, it has a feed-forward duty correction scheme using multiphase and phase mixing corrects a duty-error of system clock without requiring additional time. In this paper, the proposed DLL-based multi-clock generator can provides a synchronous clock to an external clock for I/O data communications and multiple clocks of slow and high speed operations for various IPs. The proposed DLL-based multi-clock generator was designed by the area of using CMOS process and has lock-range and maximum multiplication frequency of 800 MHz below 20psec static skew at 2.3v supply voltage.