Abstract
This paper presents a new standing-wave clock distribution scheme utilizing an inductor loading technique. The scheme can distribute multi-ten GHz uniform-phase/amplitude global clocks over a whole chip. By loading an adequate inductor, the grid pitch can be made finer than that for the conventional standing-wave technique, and clock frequency can be designed to be independent of the grid pitch. We designed a 20GHz 6 x 6 grid clock distribution network using a 0.18µm CMOS technology. For all 36 clocks, low skew less than 1.3% of the clock period and low amplitude deviation of 2% were obtained from circuit simulation.
