This article describes some techniques for implementing low- power clock and data recovery (CDR) circuits based on gated- oscillator (GO) topology for short distance applications. Here, the main tradeoffs in design of a high performance and power-efficient GO CDR are studied and based on that a top-down design methodology is introduced such that the jitter tolerance (JTOL) and frequency tolerance (FTOL) requirements of the system are simultaneously satisfied. A test chip has been implemented in standard digital 0.18 μm CMOS while the proposed CDR circuit consumes only 10.5 mW and occupies 0.045 mm2 silicon area in 2.5 Gbps data bit rate. Measurement results show a good agreement to analyses proofs the capabilities of the proposed approach for implementing low-power GO CDRs.