• Journal of Semiconductor Engineering
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2020

Handling precise timing in high-speed transceivers has always been a primary design target to achieve better performance. Many different approaches have been tried, and one of those is utilizing the beneficial nature of injection locking. Though the phenomenon was not intended for building integrated circuits at first, its coupling effect between neighboring oscillators has been utilized deliberately. Consequently, the dynamics of the injection-locked oscillator (ILO) have been explored, starting from R. Adler. As many aspects of the ILO were revealed, further studies followed to utilize the technique in practice, suggesting alternatives to the conventional frequency syntheses, which tend to be complicated and expensive. In this review, the historical analysis techniques from R. Adler are studied for better comprehension with proper notation of the variables, resulting in numerical results. In addition, how the timing jitter or phase noise in the ILO is attenuated from noise sources is presented in contrast to the clock generators based on the phase-locked loop (PLL). Although the ILO is very promising with higher cost effectiveness and better noise immunity than other schemes, unless correctly controlled or tuned, the promises above might not be realized. In order to present the favorable conditions, several strategies have been explored in diverse applications like frequency multiplication, data recovery, frequency division, clock distribution, etc. This paper reviews those research results for clock multiplication and data recovery in detail with their advantages and disadvantages they are referring to. Through this review, the readers will hopefully grasp the overall insight of the ILO, as well as its practical issues, in order to incorporate it on silicon successfully.