Thermodynamics limits in Oscillators and Phase Locked Loops

EasyChair Preprint no. 928

Abstract

In this paper the impact of thermal noise in time domain signal processing is reviewed with an emphasis on oscillators and phase locked loops. It will be shown that both oscillators and phase-locked loops display an upper bound in their efficiency that is fundamentally thermodynamic limited. Such upper bound will be used to derive two comparative figure-of-merits (FoMs) that resemble the one already present in literature. Finally, an analysis of the state of the art of the designs already present in literature confirms the proposed analysis.

Keyphrases: Figure of merit (FOM), Jitter, Phase Locked Loop (PLL), phase noise, time domain, Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO)

@Booklet{EasyChair:928,
  author = {Armina Khakpour and Antonio Liscidini},
  title = {Thermodynamics limits in Oscillators and Phase Locked Loops},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 928},

  year = {EasyChair, 2019}}