PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15905614
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-02
Publication Date: 2018-06
Patent Classification: ["375", "355000"]

Abstract:
Methods and systems are described for generating, using a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), a plurality of phases of a local clock signal, generating a phase-error signal using a phase comparator receive a phase of the local clock signal and a reference clock signal, and configured to output the phase-error signal, generating a frequency-lock assist (FLA) signal using a FLA circuit receiving one or more phases of the local clock signal and the reference clock signal, the FLA signal indicative of a magnitude of a frequency error between the reference clock signal and the local clock signal, and generating a VCO control signal using an error accumulator circuit receiving the phase-error signal and the FLA signal, and responsively providing the VCO control signal to the VCO to lock the local clock signal to the reference clock signal.

Claim (Index 11):
An apparatus comprising:\n a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) comprising a plurality of sequentially-connected logic elements, the VCO configured to provide a plurality of phases of a local clock signal, each phase provided via an output of a respective logic element of the plurality of sequentially-connected logic elements; a frequency-lock assist (FLA) circuit configured to generate an FLA signal by detecting transitions in each phase of the plurality of phases of the local clock signal in adjacent sampling instants determined by a reference clock signal, the FLA signal indicative of a magnitude of a frequency error between the local clock signal and the reference clock signal; and an error accumulation circuit configured to receive the FLA, the error accumulation circuit configured to generate a VCO control signal to set the VCO in a frequency-locked condition based at least on the received FLA signal.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 14.0
- Percentile: 88.0
- Lexical Diversity: 2.96
- Patent Class: 375.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: open
- Component Type: 1
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['15253486', '15494439', '15791373', '15602080', '15603404']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.5748291306235246
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5988500719182003
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.5772312247529922
- Mean Citation Score: 414.26060400000006
- Max Citation Score: 500.3291
- Similarity Product: 454.7760594610274

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 1
- Claim Label 103: 1
- Claim Label 112: 1
- Combined Label: 1
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test