5.10 A 1.4V 10.5MHz swing-boosted differential relaxation oscillator with 162.1dBc/Hz FOM and 9.86psrms period jitter in 0.18µm CMOS

Relaxation oscillators have a profound scope as on-chip reference clock sources or sensor front-ends in comparison to ring oscillators due to their superior frequency stability, control linearity, and wide tuning range. However, despite a better fundamental limit predicted in theory, the phase noise performance of relaxation oscillators trails behind that of ring oscillators. Furthermore, there is a huge gap between the maximum achievable 1/f2 phase noise FOM (169dBc/Hz) [1] and those achieved by recently proposed low-power relaxation oscillator implementations [1–4].