Analysis and Design of Weakly Coupled LC Oscillator Arrays Based on Phase-Domain Macromodels

An array of weakly coupled oscillators can generate multiphase signals, i.e., multiple sinusoidal signals with specific phase separations. Multiphase oscillators are attractive solutions in many electronic applications such as the synchronization of multiple processing units in digital electronics and the frequency synthesis in mixed-signal radio frequency circuits. Due to the complexity of multiphase oscillators and the large number of design parameters, novel simulation techniques are highly desired to efficiently handle such large-scale problems. In this paper, an efficient phase-domain simulation technique is proposed to calculate the phase response of inductance capacitance oscillator array. By some practical examples, it is shown how the proposed method can be exploited to identify the array topologies and parameter settings that guarantee stable phase separations. It is also shown how the proposed technique can be used to evaluate phase-noise performance.