A low-power referenceless clock and data recovery circuit with clock-edge modulation for biomedical sensor applications

This paper proposes a low-power referenceless clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit for biomedical devices or sensor applications. Its power consumption is reduced by adopting clock-edge modulation technique and using a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) based on a relaxation oscillator. Clock-edge modulation eliminates the need for an external reference clock without introducing the possibility of harmonic locking. Our CDR supports input data-rates between 200kbps and 10Mbps at 0.7V, and operate up to 24 MHz at 1.0V. The circuit is designed in a 0.18μm CMOS technology and consumes 8μW at an input data-rate of 10Mbps.