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Xue 2009
Xue 2009
Abstract—A high performance fully differential charge There are two output periodic pulse signal with equal
pump with reference voltage circuit was proposed to pulse width, Up and Dw, which output from PFD to
overcome the inevitable disadvantages in the traditional control the two circuit sources. The currents Iup and Idw
charge pump circuit, including leakage current, flew through two switchers. These two currents make the
charged/discharge current mismatch and the output ripple.
capacitance charge or discharge to obtain the direct
The phase errors and the spurious jump were reduced
greatly, and the stability of the output was improved. The current to feed to the VOC. Therefore, the currents Iup
characteristics of wide swing range of output and low and Idw should be equal.
mismatch rate of currents of the charge pump met the high However, Iup and Idw were sent to the charge pump from
performance of high speed phase locked loop application the PFD even at the locked state. Therefore, the pull-up
requirement. current and the pull-down current should be matched with
high accurate, otherwise the loop circuits will be hardly
Keywords—Charge pump; phase locked loop; differential arrive to the stable state. Moreover, the voltage Vco will be
circuit; current matching increased similarly as staircase during the lock period, the
current of the charge pump should be keep stable, it could
I. INTRODUCTION not be varied following as the output voltage of the
current source varies.
A high performance charge pump applied to the phase
locked loop (PLL) of high frequency generator is In order to reduce the power consumption, the power
important to determine quality of high speed application supplies are lower in the communication area. Therefore,
in the communication circuits. The block diagram of PLL the wider swing range of charge pump is required to
was shown as Fig. 1, which including the phase/frequency satisfy the wide oscillation frequency range of the VCO.
detector (PFD), the charge pump (CP), loop filter (LPF), The phase errors of the output frequency caused by the
voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) , phase divider and so charge leakage, charge/discharge current mismatch and
on. In PLL circuit, the output signal of the charge pump is delay of the charge pump switch. The phase error can be
feed to the VCO to control the oscillation frequency[1]. In expressed as:
high speed PLL application, the oscillation frequency
I leak Δt on ΔI Δt on Δt
would be varied dramatically even if a very small φε = 2π ( + × + × 2π × d ) (1)
variation of the control voltage of VCO existed. I cp Tref I cp Tref Tref
Therefore, the output voltage should keep constant,
otherwise the PLL would not be achieve the lock state due Where Ileak is the leakage current of charge pump, Icp is
to the great ripple of the output. Furthermore, the output the pump current, △ton is the on time of the PFD, Tref is
of the charge pump required wide swing in order to obtain the period of the reference timing, △I is the error of
the wider modulation range and noise margin of the VCO. charge /discharge current, △td is the pump switch time
Moreover, the stability of the output of the charge pump delay[4]. To the third-order charge pump phase locked
affects the performance of high speed PLL greatly, the
low pass filter in the charge pump impact to the loop loop, the rejection ability to the jump of input reference
bandwidth and the locked time as well [2,3]. frequency is described as follows:
⎡ I cp ×φe KVCD ⎤ f
Pr = 20 log ⎢ 2
⎥ − 20 log( ref ) (2)
⎢⎣ 2 f ref ⎥⎦ f p1
Where, KVCO is the gain of VCO, fref is the reference
clock frequency, fp1is the polo frequency of the filter, and
Icp is the charge pump current[5-8].
Figure 1. The Block diagram of PLL
According to the equations above, the performance of
the high speed PLL is depend on the quality and structure
of the charge pump, especially to the current match C. The Improved Charge Pump with Error Amplifier
accuracy and the stability of the voltage output. The improved circuit has been proposed which shown
II. CONFIGURATION OF THE CHARGE PUMP as Fig.3 [10,11]. The bias voltage VN and the amplifier
circuits were designed in order to overcoming the current
OVERVIEW mismatching. The high gain amplifier was applied to
The charge pump is a switched controlled circuit. The amplify the error of the currents, and the close loop has
basic function of the charge pump then converts the been built in order to ensure the currents of charge and
positive voltage pulses of the Up input signals into the discharge is equal.
charging current pulses to loop filter network and the However, this circuit could not solve the phase error
positive voltage pulses of the Down input signals into the which introduced by charge leakage. Considering the
discharging current pulses. Although inputs and outputs same influence of the leakage charges to the charge and
are voltage and current signals respectively, they have the discharge currents, a novel method applied fully
same pattern of the waveform if mismatches and offsets differential structure to reject this common-mode signal
are neglected. The current sources have to be matched. was proposed in this paper in order to improve the
A. The Model of Charge Pump accuracy of the charge pump.
The charge pump of PLL consists of two current
sources Iup and Idw, which controlled by switch signal
UP and DW. The ideal charge pump model is shown as
Fig.2. Three states of charge pump were listed in Table 1.
TABLE I.
STATES OF CHARGE PUMP
886
2009 IEEE Symposium on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ISIEA 2009), October 4-6, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
III. DIFFERENTIAL CHARGE PUMP WITH transistors M17 to M20 and the capacitor consist of the
REFERENCE VOLTAGE CIRCUIT reference voltage circuit as shown in the middle area.
As the discussion above, the differential structure was Since the response characteristics of the operational
introduced in charge pump circuit in order to reduce not amplifier and the effect of the point Vref to the output
only the phase error which caused by the leakage charge, voltage Vout interrupted the stability of output voltage of
but also to improve the accuracy of the current match. the charge pump. These four transistors avoided the point
Moreover, the reference voltage circuit with feedback Vout sucking the current from Vref via the operation
loop will be introduced to increase the stability and reduce amplifier if the voltage of Vout is higher than Vref.
the system noises. Otherwise, the reverse circuits would be broken, and
resulted in the output voltage changed by force. The
The overall circuit was shown as Fig. 5, it consists of capacitor is used to improve the stability of the reference
two parts, one is the differential structure with pull-up and voltage.
pull-down circuits, which designed based on the improved
circuits as mentioned in section II (C) , and the other part The control signals of M17 to M20 are identical to the
is the reference voltage circuit for the output voltage signals applied to the main circuit. Moreover, the
stability improvement. distribution of the four signals to the transistors should
meet the requirement of which the current Iup or Idw can
flow in the circuit formed by M17 and M20, or M19 and
M19. The voltage output of the charge pump should keep
stable when reference voltage circuit applied due to the
two input signals fref and fdiv are equal.
A. Power Consumption and Speed Consideration
For the high speed and low power consumption circuits
design, how to eliminate the non-ideal characteristic of the
MOS transistors is important [14,15]. The positions of
switchers of the charge pump were moved to the source of
the current source, then they did not connect to the output.
Therefore, on the one hand, the switchers could not be
Figure 5. The differential charge pump with reference voltage circuit
impacted by the charge injection effect almost, on the
other hand, the speed improvement without increasing the
A Differential Circuit of Pump circuit biased current. This resulted in the power consumption
Considering the same influence of the leakage charges decreased.
to the charge and discharge currents, a fully differential As to the circuit consists of M7 and M10, would
structure to reject this common-mode signal was designed precharge to the M11 and M6, so the waveform of current
in the circuit in order to improve the accuracy of the of I2 and I6 were improved, and the linearity of the output
charge pump [12,13]. Vo1 and Vo2 was optimized. Therefore the high speed
When UP=1, DW=0, M1 and M16 are both on, while charge pump with wider swing range and stable output
M4, and M13 were cut off, the current I3 flew to Vo1, voltage were obtained.
capacitor CL1 was charged, the voltage of Vo1 was
increased. On the contrary, capacitor CL2 was discharged IV. RESULT ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION
forming current I8, and the voltage of Vo2 was decreased. The charge pump proposed here was simulated
The differential voltage Vo1-Vo2 would increase. When according to Chartered 0.35μm technology, the power
UP=0 and DW=1, M4 and M13 were on, M1 and M16
supply is 3.3V, and the simulation tool is Spectre RF.
were cut off, the differential voltage would decrease. If
leakage current existed at the points of Vo1 and Vo2, the The output voltage variation from zero to 3.3V to the
differential voltage Vo1-Vo2 could not be varied due to the pull-up and pull-down currents, and the relationship of the
leaked currents were counteracted each other. Therefore, output voltage and the current of charge and discharge of
not only the current sources matched, but also the error of the charge pump was shown as Fig. 6. The output currents
did not vary during the period of the output was varied
phase φε which introduced by leakage charge eliminated. from 1V to 3V. Moreover, the mismatch currents of
Furthermore, the effect of charge sharing would be charge and discharge are 7.9uA and 8.2uA respectively
weakened when M6 and M11 keep working in saturation under the maximum mismatch condition. The mismatch
area. ratio was less than 0.3% , showing that the charge pump
has high match accuracy whatever in phase and current.
B Reference Voltage Circuit
Therefore, the current source of charge pump was
The signals up and down still input the charge pump satisfied the requirement of the high performance.
from the PFD when the circuit is in the locked state, this Fig. 7 shows the variation of the output voltage with the
result in the ripple of output voltage of the charge pump. timing. The variation of the output voltage is stable
Therefore, the stability of VOC was degraded and the without exhibiting any spurious jump phenomenon. This
system noise would be increased. The reference voltage characteristic ensures the stability of the PLL during the
circuit was proposed here is to solve the problem that the capture and locked status. Therefore, the noise features
switching effect impacted to the output voltage and the can be improved of the whole loop circuits.
current sources.
The operation amplifier works as voltage follower to
make the voltage Vref approaching to Vout. The four
887
2009 IEEE Symposium on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ISIEA 2009), October 4-6, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
REFERENCES
[1] W. Rhee, “Design of high-performance CMOS charge pumps in
phase locked loops,” Proc. Int. Symp. Circuits Syst., vol. 2, pp.
545–548, 1999.
[2] J.-S. Lee and M.-S. Keel, “Charge pump with perfect current
matching characteristics in phase-locked loops,” Electron. Lett.,
vol. 36, pp.1907–1908, 2000.
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