US Patent 7605665 Fractional-N phase locked loop

An apparatus and method is disclosed to substantially reduce phase noise introduced in fractional-N phase-locked loop (PLL) through feedback modulation. A fractional frequency divider is introduced in the feedback path of the PLL to generate a true fractional division factor with finite fractional steps to increase the resolution of the PLL by a factor equal to the inverse of the finite step size in the fractional frequency divider. Increasing the resolution of the PLL reduces phase noise. The fractional frequency divider uses the true fractional division factor to divide the frequency of a single output of a multi-phased voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) by the fractional division factor to match the frequency of the divided feedback signal to frequency a reference signal. The fractional frequency divider incrementally selects among all the outputs of the multi-phased VCO according to either a forward phase shifting operation or a backward phase shifting operation to generate a true fractional division factor.