The design of a programmable frequency divider, which is one of the components of the phase-locked loop （PLL） frequency synthesizer for transmitter and receiver in IEEE 802. 11 a standard, is investigated. The main steps in very large-scale integration （VLSI） design flow such as logic synthesis, floorplan and placement ＆ routing （P ＆ R） are introduced. By back-annotating the back-end information to the front-end design, the custom wire-load model is created and used for optimizing the design flow under deep submicron technology. The programmable frequency divider is implemented based on Artisan TSMC （Taiwan Semicoductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. ）0. 18μm CMOS （complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor） standard cells and fabricated. The Chip area is 1 360. 5μm^2 and can work in the range of 100 to 200 MHz. The measurement results indicate that the design conforms to the frequency division precision.
Dual-modulus prescalers （DMP） for RF receivers are studied. An improved D-latch is proposed to increase the speed and the driving capability of the DMP. A novel D-latch architecture integrated with ‘OR＇ logic is proposed to decrease the complexity of the circuit. A divided-by-16/17 DMP for application in a digital video broadcasting-terrestrial receiver is realized with a TSMC 0.18μm mixed-signal CMOS process. The programmable ＆ pulse swallow divider in this receiver is designed with a 0.18μm CMOS standard cell library and realized in the same process. The measured results show that the DMP has an output jitter of less than 0.03% and works well with the programmable ＆ pulse swallow divider.
