摘要 |
Systems and methods for increasing the frequency range of an output signal generated by a VCO, where one or more variable delay units are incorporated into an interpolative VCO to decrease the minimum frequency at which the VCO oscillates. In one embodiment, the VCO includes a ring of serially connected inverters, a set of bypass circuits and a set of variable delay units. The bypass circuits are coupled to the ring of serially connected inverters to bypass one or more of the serially connected inverters when enabled. Each variable delay unit delays signal transitions at the input of a corresponding one of the serially connected inverters by a variable amount. The variable delay units may be positioned in series with the ring of inverters, in parallel with the bypass paths, or in parallel with corresponding inverters in the ring of inverters.
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