Chaos-based high-EMC spread-spectrum clock generator

This paper proposes a spread-spectrum clock generator which is meant to respect EMC norm compliance from standard regulations. This is obtained through a frequency modulation driven by a chaotic signal, i.e. through the injection of a chaos-based jitter, so to avoid strict periodicity in the clock and thus high peaks in its power spectral density. The circuit has been designed in 0.35μm technology; measurements from prototypes show EMC improvement of approximately 18dB with respect to the reference case.