Traveling Wave Ring Oscillator-based Global Clock Distribution Network

In modern VLSI system, clock signal, the quality of which affects the performance of the whole system, is considered to be more and more important. With the increasing frequency and integration degree, design of the high quality clock network is facing greater and greater challenges, due to the requirements of lower clock uncertainty and lower power consumption.In this paper, rotary traveling wave oscillator (RTWO), a giga Hertz clock generation circuit, is researched and analyzed. RTWO consists of a differential transmission line and multiple anti-parallel inverter pairs. And RTWO is low power consuming, with low jitter. The principle of RTWO is greatly related to the microelectronics and transmission line model. Based on the principle analysis and software simulation, this paper analyzes every component of RTWO in detail and gives out the corresponding mathematical model and simulation results. Moreover, it realizes the simulation for one ring of RTWO, both in time and frequency domain. It also analyzes the impact of the geometric parameters for the performance of RTWO, which may help to improve the further research. Finally this paper completes the simulation for the arrays of oscillators, and the simulation results show that the RTWO array has very good phase congruency and low skew that it can be used for the global clock distribution networks for the next generation VLSI circuits.