ISSCC 2016 / SESSION 5 / ANALOG TECHNIQUES / 5.
5.9 A 24MHz Crystal Oscillator with Robust Fast
Start-Up Using Dithered Injection
Danielle Griffith1, James Murdock1, Per Torstein Røine2
1
Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX, 2Texas Instruments, Oslo, Norway
Wireless nodes in Internet-of-Everything (IoE) applications achieve low power
consumption by operating the radio at very low duty cycles. The wireless node
spends most of its time in sleep, waking only occasionally to transmit or receive
data. For some standards, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), the data or
advertising packet length can be less than the time it takes the crystal oscillator,
which is used as the reference clock for the radio’s PLL, to turn on. Figure 5.9.1
shows a simplified power profile for a node with a typical BLE advertising packet
length. A significant fraction of energy used for each RX/TX burst is used to turn
on the oscillator. For applications where average power is not dominated by
sleep power, the crystal oscillator start-up time can be a large contributor to
average power consumption.
As shown in Fig. 5.9.2, the crystal is modeled by lumped elements where Lm, Rm,
and Cm are the motional inductance, resistance, and capacitance, and Co is the
parasitic capacitance. The load capacitance, CL must be chosen to match the
crystal specification to get the correct resonance frequency. When used with an
amplifier with transconductance gm, the oscillator negative resistance Rn
becomes െ݃௠
ܴ௡ ൌ
ሺʹߨ݂ሻଶ ሺʹ‫ܥ‬௅ ሻଶ
and the time constant τ for the oscillator start-up is
െʹ‫ܮ‬௠
ɒൌ Ǥ
ܴ௠ ൅ ܴ௡
Stable frequency is usually obtained in 7τ to 15τ [1]. For a given oscillator
frequency, start-up time can be reduced in several ways. First, gm can be
increased by increasing bias current. This decreases start-up time, but
increases power consumption, therefore start-up energy remains approximately
constant. Also, gm can be increased for the same current by using transistors
with shorter channel length. However, this degrades oscillator phase noise and
radio performance. Next, a crystal can be chosen with a lower specified CL. This
is an effective technique, but increases frequency sensitivity to environmental
changes. Also, crystals with lower values of CL (<7pF) are not as commonly
available as those with larger values (>=9pF). Another approach is to choose a
crystal with lower Lm and higher Cm. This corresponds to crystals with larger
package sizes, which increases the form factor of the wireless node. Figure
5.9.2 shows calculated start-up times for a fixed value of gm as a function of
crystal package size and CL. The next approach is to inject a clock into the crystal
that is very close to its resonance frequency [2] on initial start-up. However, this
technique is only effective if the injected clock is no more than ±0.5% different
in frequency from the crystal resonance. For best results, the injected clock
should be within ±0.25% of the crystal resonance frequency. This places tight
requirements on the oscillator used to generate the injected clock – both stable
frequency over temperature and a large number of bits used to tune the
frequency. Injection is done in [3], but requires an injection oscillator that must
be precisely calibrated to the crystal oscillator frequency. In [4], the frequency
tuning is avoided by injecting the crystal with a chirp signal as well as
temporarily increasing the gm with a parallel oscillator, which gives robust
results over voltage and temperature although a relatively low value of CL is
used.
A robust fast-start-up technique that does not require a precisely tuned injection
oscillator is shown in Fig. 5.9.3. The crystal oscillator is implemented with a
Pierce topology with transistor M1, bias resistor Rfb and current Ibias. The load
capacitance CL is provided by the series combination of 2 capacitors of value
2CL. The injection oscillator operates at 48MHz and is also used as the system
clock. Its frequency can be tuned from ~23MHz to ~300MHz with a 7b control
word, Fctrl<7:1>. Fctrl<7:1> are binary weighted, and Fctrl<0> is weighted equally
to Fctrl<1>. Around the nominal 48MHz frequency, changing Fctrl<1> causes a 2%
change in frequency. The LSB step size is limited by the minimum capacitor size
in this process. As shown in the crystal and injection oscillator start-up
sequence in Fig. 5.9.4, when the crystal oscillator is started, the injection is
enabled for 5μs. The injection can either be a single tone, Finj, or dithered. With
single-tone injection, Finj can be up to 2% (1 LSB) off from Fxosc. When the
frequency error Ferror=Fxosc-Finj is greater than ~0.5%, the start-up time reduction
is significantly less and therefore start-up time will vary from part to part and
104 • 2016 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference
over temperature. If dithered injection is chosen, the injection oscillator dithers
Fctrl<0> based on a 5b duty cycle word and using its own clock, such that the
minimum and maximum instantaneous frequencies, Fmin and Fmax, are lower and
higher than the crystal resonance frequency, Fxosc. This ensures that the crystal
receives energy at its resonance frequency, even as the injection frequency
varies over temperature. Therefore the crystal start-up time reduction works
robustly without requiring an injection oscillator with better than ±0.5%
frequency stability over temperature or a frequency-control LSB of less than
0.5%. Instead, the injection clock can be generated with an oscillator that has
low area and relaxed performance requirements.
Figure 5.9.5 shows the measured crystal oscillator start-up time over
temperature for two different crystals. The first has a 3.2×2.5mm2 package size,
Lm=12mH, and CL=6pF. The second is a slower crystal of size 2.0×1.6mm2,
Lm=22mH, and CL=9pF. For the same oscillator gm, the second configuration will
have >4× longer start-up time than the first, as described by the equations for Rn
and τ above. For each crystal, the start-up time is measured over temperature
with the injected clock frequency off, a single tone, and dithered. Without
injection, the start-up time is 6× longer for the 2.0×1.6mm2 compared to the
3.2×2.5mm2 crystal. With a single tone injection, the start-up time is decreased
by 1.7× to 5× when Ferror is 1% and by 3.5× when Ferror is 1.9%. With dithered
injection, the start-up time is decreased by 6.2× for the slower crystal, and 6.7×
for the faster crystal. Wireless-node average power consumption is decreased
because less energy is required to start the crystal oscillator even as temperature
varies, and the node can spend more time asleep. The power required for the
injection oscillator drivers is insignificant because they are used for only 5μs,
and the injection oscillator is already enabled as the system clock.
Figure 5.9.6 summarizes the crystal oscillator performance and compares it to
previously published works. Reference [5] shows the start-up time achieved
without fast-start-up circuitry and when low phase noise (longer channel length
transistors) and high frequency stability (larger CL) are required for cellular
applications. In [3], low start-up time is achieved with a precisely tuned injection
oscillator, but CL and crystal size are not mentioned. In [4], start-up time
reduction is robust, but the area and oscillator frequency are higher and CL is
low. Also, the chirp duration is 40μs, creating a lower bound for the start-up
time. In this work, the start-up reduction technique can be used with any crystal
type and requires very little area. The crystal oscillator core, bias, clock buffers,
and tuning capacitors occupy 0.08mm2. The injection oscillator occupies 0.015
mm2 but is also used as the system clock. Therefore, the only extra area needed
for the fast-start-up function is 0.002mm2 for the drivers and duty-cycle
dithering circuitry. A die micrograph is shown in Fig. 5.9.7. The oscillator is
fabricated in a low-leakage 65nm CMOS process.
In conclusion, a crystal oscillator has been implemented with fast start-up which
reduces the average power consumption of a duty-cycled wireless node. The
start-up time is reduced by injecting the crystal oscillator with a frequency close
to the resonance frequency for 5μs, while using the injection oscillator to dither
its own frequency control word LSB such that energy is spread around the
crystal frequency. This allows the start-up time to be low even as the injection
oscillator frequency drifts over temperature. Frequency stability and tuning
requirements for the injection oscillator are therefore relaxed. This technique
allows small-form-factor crystals to be used in IoE applications without a power
penalty.
Acknowledgements:
The authors would like to acknowledge Thomas Murphy for digital circuitry
design.
References:
[1] A. Rusznyak, “Start-up time of CMOS oscillators,” IEEE Trans. Circuits and
Systems, vol. 34, pp. 259-268, Mar. 1987.
[2] S. A. Blanchard, “Quick start crystal oscillator circuit,” Proc.
University/Government/Industry Microelectronics Symp., pp. 78-81, June 2003.
[3] Y. I. Kwon et al., “An Ultra Low-Power CMOS Transceiver Using Various
Low-Power Techniques for LR-WPAN Applications,” IEEE Trans. Circuits and
Systems, vol. 59, pp. 324-336, Feb. 2012.
[4] S. Iguchi et al., “92% start-up time reduction by variation-tolerant chirp injec-
tion (CI) and negative resistance booster (NRB) in 39MHz crystal oscillator,”
IEEE Symp. VLSI Circuits, pp. 1-2, June 2014.
[5] Y. Chang et al., “A Differential Digitally Controlled Crystal Oscillator With a
14-Bit Tuning Resolution and Sine Wave Outputs for Cellular Applications,”
IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, pp. 421-434, 2012.
978-1-4673-9467-3/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
 ISSCC 2016 / February 1, 2016 / 4:45 PM

Figure 5.9.1: Simplified power profile of a wireless node with and without Figure 5.9.2: Start-up time as a function of load capacitance and crystal
crystal oscillator fast start-up. package size. The two crystals measured in this work are labeled.

Figure 5.9.3: Block diagram of the fast-start-up crystal oscillator using Figure 5.9.4: Crystal and injection oscillator start-up sequence showing
injection oscillator with dithered frequency control word. single-tone and dithered frequency injection.

Figure 5.9.5: Measured crystal oscillator start-up time over temperature for
two crystal configurations and three injection conditions. Figure 5.9.6: Summary of measured results and comparison to previous work.

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Figure 5.9.7: Die micrograph of the fast-start-up crystal oscillator and

injection oscillator in a 65nm process.

• 2016 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference 978-1-4673-9467-3/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE