A Low Energy Clock Network with a Huge Number of Local Synchronized Oscillators

<div>A clock system for a huge grid of small clock regions is presented. There is an oscillator in each clock region, which drives the local clock of a processing element (PE). The oscillators are kept synchronized by exploiting the phase of their neighbors. In an infinite mesh, the clock skew would be zero, but in a network of limited size there will be fringe effects. In a mesh with 25×25 oscillators, the maximum skew between neighboring regions is within 3.3 ps. By slightly adjusting the free running frequency of the oscillators, this skew can be reduced to 1.2 ps. The mesh may contain millions of clock regions.</div><div> Because there is no central clock, both power consumption and clock frequency can be improved compared to a conventional clock distribution network. A PE of 150×150 µm² running at 6.7 GHz with 93 master-slave flip-flops is used as an example. The PE-internal clock skew is less than 2.3 ps, and the energy consumption of the clock system 807 µW per PE. It corresponds to an effective gate and wire capacitance of 509 aF, or 7.3 gate capacitances.</div><div> Power noise is reduced by scheduling the local oscillators gradually along one of the grid’s axes. In this way, surge currents, which generally have their peaks at the clock edges, are distributed evenly over a full clock cycle.</div>

A Low Energy Clock Network with a Huge Number of Local Synchronized Oscillators

<div>A clock system for a huge grid of small clock regions is presented. There is an oscillator in each clock region, which drives the local clock of a processing element (PE). The oscillators are kept synchronized by exploiting the phase of their neighbors. In an infinite mesh, the clock skew would be zero, but in a network of limited size there will be fringe effects. In a mesh with 25×25 oscillators, the maximum skew between neighboring regions is within 3.3 ps. By slightly adjusting the free running frequency of the oscillators, this skew can be reduced to 1.2 ps. The mesh may contain millions of clock regions.</div><div> Because there is no central clock, both power consumption and clock frequency can be improved compared to a conventional clock distribution network. A PE of 150×150 µm² running at 6.7 GHz with 93 master-slave flip-flops is used as an example. The PE-internal clock skew is less than 2.3 ps, and the energy consumption of the clock system 807 µW per PE. It corresponds to an effective gate and wire capacitance of 509 aF, or 7.3 gate capacitances.</div><div> Power noise is reduced by scheduling the local oscillators gradually along one of the grid’s axes. In this way, surge currents, which generally have their peaks at the clock edges, are distributed evenly over a full clock cycle.</div>

Effects of Synchronization Errors on Wavelet-based CR-OFDM Systems in Doubly Selective Fading Channels

The Major Setback of a Multi-Carrier Modulation (MCM) is Synchronization Errors, which includes time, frequency and phase offset. Especially, Wavelet based MCM catches the eyes of researchers due to its flexibilities which are seen as one of the strong contender for Cognitive Radios. Synchronization errors are mainly due to mobility between nodes and sub-optimal local oscillators and it is necessary to learn the behavior of wavelets under these channel fading conditions. In this paper, we present the joint effects of Wavelet-based Cognitive Radio OFDM (CR-WOFDM) systems under Synchronization Error in terms of based bit error rate (BER). BER Outputs of WOFDM is compared with FFT based OFDM with Cyclic Prefix (CP-OFDM) systems in a doubly-selective channel by designing a communication system for computer simulation. Several well-known wavelets are chosen and analyzed, including Daubechies (db), Symlets (sym), Coiflets (coif), Fejér-Korovkin (fk) filters, and biorthogonal (bior) wavelets. First, we show the behavior of wavelets in terms of BER by considering different doubly selective channel Power Delay Profile (PDP) like, AWGN, FLAT, Pedestrian and Vehicular and channel Doppler models like, Uniform and JAKES. Finally, we calculate and plot Signal-to-Interference Ratio (SIR) of WOFDM with Time and Frequency Offset and compared the results with FFT based CP-OFDM.

Spin Laser Local Oscillators for Homodyne Detection in Coherent Optical Communications

We numerically investigate spin-controlled vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (spin-VCSELs) for local oscillators, which are based on an injection locking technique used in coherent optical communications. Under the spin polarization modulation of an injection-locked spin-VCSEL, frequency-shifted and phase-correlated optical sidebands are generated with an orthogonal polarization against the injection light, and one of the sidebands is resonantly enhanced due to the linear birefringence in the spin-VCSEL. We determine that the peak strength and peak frequency in the spin polarization modulation sensitivity of the injection-locked spin-VCSEL depend on detuning frequency and injection ratio conditions. As a proof of concept, 25-Gbaud and 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation optical data signals and a pilot tone are generated, and the pilot tone is used for the injection locking of a spin-VCSEL. An orthogonally-polarized modulation sideband generated from the injection-locked spin-VCSEL is used as a frequency-shifted local oscillator (LO). We verify that the frequency-shifted LO can be used for the homodyne detection of optical data signals with no degradation. Our findings suggest a novel application of spin-VCSELs for coherent optical communications.

Coherent optical communications using coherence-cloned Kerr soliton microcombs

Dissipative Kerr soliton microcomb has been recognized as a promising on-chip multi-wavelength laser source for fiber optical communications, as its comb lines possess frequency and phase stability far beyond the independent lasers. In the scenarios of coherent optical transmission and interconnect, a highly beneficial but rarely explored target is to re-generate a Kerr soliton microcomb at the receiver side as local oscillators that conserve the frequency and phase property of the incoming data carriers, so that to enable coherent detection with minimized optical and electrical compensations. Here, by using the techniques of pump laser conveying and two-point locking, we implement re-generation of a Kerr soliton microcomb that faithfully clones the frequency and phase coherence of another microcomb sent from 50 km away. Moreover, leveraging the coherence-cloned soliton microcombs as carriers and local oscillators, we demonstrate terabit coherent data interconnect, wherein traditional digital processes for frequency offset estimation is totally dispensed with, and carrier phase estimation is substantially simplified via slowed-down phase estimation rate per channel and joint phase estimation among multiple channels. Our work reveals that, in addition to providing a multitude of laser tones, regulating the frequency and phase of Kerr soliton microcombs among transmitters and receivers can significantly improve optical coherent communication in terms of performance, power consumption, and simplicity.

Testing of Frequency Synthesizers for ZigBee Transceivers

ZigBee is a wireless standard defined for low data rate applications with ultra-low power requirements. Devices based on this standard are expected to be low cost with a large battery life or use energy harvesting techniques.As a part of a major project for developing a fully functional RF transceiver chip complying with the standard, frequency synthesizers have been designed based on integer-N phase lock loops which are expected to work as local oscillators for both the transmitter and the receiver. The standard required the PLLs to be programmable to 16 channels in the 2.4-2.5 GHz range. One of the PLLs used an LC VCO while the other used a ring VCO. This work was meant to test these PLLs to make sure that they met the specifications required of them as per the standard.