A Low Noise Fault Tolerant Radiation Hardened 2.56 Gbps Clock-Data Recovery Circuit with High Speed Feed Forward Correction in 65 nm CMOS

A fault tolerant, radiation hardened Clock and Data Recovery (CDR) architecture is presented for high-energy physics and space applications. The CDR employs a novel soft-error tolerant Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) and includes a high-speed feed-forward path to stabilize the CDR to compensate for an additional pole in the VCO to harden it against ionizing particles. The CDR has a data rate of 2.56 Gbps and uses In-Phase/Quadrature (IQ) clocks in combination with a frequency detector (FD) to increase the pull-in range. The circuit was designed in a 65 nm CMOS technology and has a core power consumption of only 34 mW.