Survey of integrated‐circuit‐oscillator phase‐noise analysis

Abstract

This tutorial distills the salient phase-noise analysis concepts and key equations developed over the last 75 years relevant to integrated circuit oscillators. Oscillator phase and amplitude fluctuations have been studied since at least 1938 when Berstein solved the Fokker-Planck equations for the phase/amplitude distributions of a resonant oscillator.The principal contribution of this work is the organized, unified presentation of eclectic phase-noise analysis techniques, facilitating their application to integrated circuit oscillator design. Furthermore, we demonstrate that all these methods boil down to obtaining three things: (1) noise modulation function; (2) noise transfer function; and (3) current-controlled oscillator gain. For each method, this paper provides a short background explanation of the technique, a step-by-step procedure of how to apply the method to hand calculation/computer simulation, and a worked example to demonstrate how to analyze a practical oscillator circuit with that method.This survey article chiefly deals with phase-noise analysis methods, so to restrict its scope, we limit our discussion to the following: (1) analyzing integrated circuit metal-oxide-semiconductor/bipolar junction transistor-based LC, delay, and ring oscillator topologies; (2) considering a few oscillator harmonics in our analysis; (3) analyzing thermal/flicker intrinsic device-noise sources rather than environmental/parametric noise/ wander; (4) providing mainly qualitative amplitude-noise discussions; and (5) omitting measurement methods/phase-noise reduction techniques.We categorize oscillators into one of three varieties, as illustrated in Figure 3: resonant, delay line, or relaxation. First, the resonant oscillator consists of a nonlinear amplifier and a lumped frequencyselective network or resonator, which typically has a band-pass frequency response with a single magnitude peak as indicated conceptually in the figure. This resonator can take the form of an LC tank circuit, dielectric puck, quartz crystal, SAW or bulk acoustic wave transducer, yttrium iron garnet resonator, or ceramic disk resonator to name a few [43,147,148]. IC resonant oscillators typically use LC tanks, although they are often designed to work in concert with an external 874 E. PANKRATZ AND E. SÁNCHEZ-SINENCIO ! ss t ð Þ correspond to the roughly circular trajectory in the figure called a limit cycle [150].Figure 4. Optoelectronic delay-line oscillator. 876 E. PANKRATZ AND E. SÁNCHEZ-SINENCIO For some subtleties of amplitude-noise behavior, see [50,143], where [50] also points out effects of not employing Floquet normalization (cf. Section 4.7).½ =fVoigt ð Þ 2(Gaussian) at small offsets [78,151,152,154]. Chorti also observed that, in general, noise processes with long correlation times tend to create such 'Gaussian' voltage spectra for small frequency offsets f m [151,152]. 4 Note well that, technically, defining spectra for f proves problematic, as it is not stationary and, what is worse, not bounded. This is in fact one reason why the ...

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“…Therefore, v trajectory, is subject to rectification 1 Since rectification is local, it is possible(ev limit cycle of vdp oscillator, that the mappi imaging the mapping is piecewise constant. an example for quadratic ) 2 x has no dissipation term, is g equation (6) hould be noted, Ĥ , being em, is by definition a constant 2 ) changes.…”

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