Jitter-Power minimization of digital frequency synthesis architectures

Digital intensive architectures allow for flexibly programmable frequency synthesis. Timing jitter and/or phase noise is an important quality criterion for synthesizers. This paper reviews fundamental limitations for jitter in digital frequency architectures, aiming at finding a basis to compare alternative architectures and optimize jitter performance. It motivates why the product of jitter variance and power consumption is a useful figure of merit (FoM) for optimization, based on fundamental physical limitations. Applying this FoM to multi-phase clock generation leads to the conclusion that circuits with low delay are preferred, favoring a shift register architecture ("ring counter") over a Delay Locked Loop. For a PLL a Jitter-Power FoM is also defined and we show that significant improvements have been made during recent years.