Energy-Efficient Gain Cell and Its Applications in the Limiting Amplifier and Ring Oscillator for Gbps Communications.

This paper presents a low-power, high gain-bandwidth product (GBW) gain cell for gigabits per-second communications. Based on this gain cell, a large GBW limiting amplifier (LA) and two types of high oscillation-frequency ring oscillators (ROs) are implemented with good energy efficiencies. Fabricated in the 0.18 pm CMOS process, the proposed LA can support 1.25 Gbps data-rate with a measured GBW of 338 GHz under 5 mW. The proposed single- and multi-loop ROs obtain a simulated typical oscillation frequency of 5.26 GHz and 6.96 GHz, respectively, under 6.2 mW, which is less than one-eighth the power consumption of published ROs at similar frequencies in the same process.