Simone Dartizio, researcher at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, received the ISSCC 2023 Jan Van Vessem Award for Oustanding European Paper for the paper ‘A 76.7fs-Integrated-Jitter and -71.9dBc In-Band Fractional-Spur Bang-Bang Digital PLL Based on an Inverse-Constant-Slope DTC and FCW Subtractive Dithering.’
Francesco Tesolin, Giacomo Castoro, Francesco Buccoleri, Luca Lanzoni, Michele Rossoni, Dmytro Cherniak, Luca Bertulessi, Carlo Samori, Andrea Lacaita and Salvatore Levantino also contributed to the paper, which was presented during the 2023 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.
Frequency synthesizers, implemented on integrated circuits, play a crucial role in the operation of any modern device with an internet connection. Their spectral purity performance is critical to ensuring the maximum communication speed between the device and the network. Improving the performance of these synthesizers is therefore essential to enable the use of future generations of wireless communication systems (6G).
Digital single-bit frequency synthesizers, known as bang-bang PLLs, are excellent choices for applications where compactness and portability are key requirements, such as in smartphones, due to their minimal footprint. However, due to the poor spectral purity of such systems, their use has been limited so far. The awarded article outlines the design and experimental measurements of a bang-bang PLL prototype that achieves excellent spectral purity performance, currently the best in the literature among these systems.
The success of this prototype is attributed to the use of a new extremely linear digital-to-analog converter, crucial for achieving beyond state-of-the-art performance. The prototype was developed in the ARPLab laboratory at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano and manufactured using a 28nm CMOS TSMC technology. The results concretely demonstrate the feasibility of using bang-bang PLLs for high-performance wireless applications.
