Comparative analysis of MEMS, programmable, and synthesized frequency control devices versus traditional quartz based devices

Abstract

Over the years there has been a natural evolution of frequency control devices. This has come about due to the various requirements, some being cost driven, others performance/reliability issues and others by the ever reducing design cycle times. The incumbent quartz based devices have long since been the standard by which most of the new invention devices are compared, at least from a marketing standpoint. This is due to the long (some 75 years) history of quartz as a very stable, high quality material. Frequency versus temperature response as well as aging, jitter and phase noise characteristics are well chronicled in the industry. However a concise technical correlation of such characteristics with the 'replacement' technology is rather elusive. This exercise seeks to apply standard measurement techniques under the same test conditions for all devices for direct comparison of performance and capability.All devices characterized in this paper were commercially purchased to ensure a random sampling of the technology. This data represents the technology that was commercially available at the time of the study. Frequency Temperature Test Conditions:All devices were tested at 0.2° C step size in the same test system at the same time. -40 -20

A study on MEMS oscillators‘ frequency drift of temperature

“…The size of Quarts oscillators which are 10 times than that of MEMS oscillators is so big that it prevents Quarts oscillators from widely usage in electronic production fabricated smaller and smaller. Instead, MEMS oscillators with micro size are preferable to the electronic production market [3]. What is the most important is that cost reduces sharply to a affordable level with the development of the science of material and the advance of manufacturing process [4].…”

RF MEMS/NEMS resonators for wireless communication systems and adsorption-desorption phase noise

“…Fig. 3 shows the values of f 0 Q reported in the literature for some of the realized capacitive MEMS resonators, for which we also show the values of the resonance frequency and the Q factor [14,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. This diagram can be used for the comparison of the performance of RF MEMS resonators and quartz resonators.…”

“…Capacitive resonators typically have R m of the order of 1-100 kΩ (regardless of the resonance frequency [3]), which can be a problem for coupling the resonators with antennae or other RF devices. For example, a flexural resonator (f 0 =5.1 MHz, Q=80000) presented in [31] has R m =35 k; the Si resonator oscillating in flexural mode (f 0 =1 MHz, Q=1000), described in [56], has a relatively small value of motional resistance (340 ), whereas the flexural Si resonator (f 0 =14 MHz, Q=1500) from [57] has an extremely high value (1 M). A Si square wine-glass mode resonator [29] has R m =10 k (f 0 =2 MHz, Q=4.0510 6 ).…”

Concepts and Key Technologies of Microelectromechanical Systems Resonators

“…In addition, quartz crystals are not compatible with CMOS processes [11] and their integration [11], reliability [12], and power potential [13] are unsatisfactory. Recently, researchers have been working to replace conventional quartz resonators with silicon-based resonators because of their small size [3], high reliability [14], good compatibility with CMOS processes [15], and low-cost batch manufacturing [16]. MEMS resonators have been reported to have excellent long-term stability [10], high quality factors, and high reliability.…”