A Low-Area, Low-Power, Wide Tuning Range Digitally Controlled Oscillator for Power Management Systems in 28 nm CMOS technology

Nowadays, in the world of high-performance computing, saving energy when great computing power is not needed is a must-to-have feature. This usually involves the implementation of Power Management Systems (PMS) to apply power saving polices such as frequency scaling. In particular, for this feature, the actuators of PMS are usually implemented with Phase- or Frequency-Locked Loops, which should occupy a small area and exhibit a low-power consumption. Additionally, they should be able to generate a wide range of frequencies in the order of a few GHz with a fine granularity of a few hundreds of MHz. Since the core of such loops is a tunable oscillator, in this work we present a pseudo-differential Ring Digitally Controlled Oscillator (DCO) implemented with a standard 28 nm CMOS technology to be used in PMS. The proposed DCO features a well-balanced behavior between the noise performance and a wide tuning range, a low-area, and a low-power consumption.