One of the most sensitive blocks in the RF system is the oscillator. The conflicting design requirements of power, tuning range, and phase noise make oscillator design far from easy, which explains the popularity of oscillator research in recent years. Unfortunately, available literature in this area is difficult to understand and provides little design insight.
The Designer's Guide to High-Purity Oscillators addresses the topic of oscillator design from a different perspective. By introducing a new paradigm that accurately captures the subtleties of phase noise it answers the question: `why do oscillators behave in a particular way?’ and `what can be done to achieve an optimum design?’ Simple formulas are presented that accurately predict the noise performance of oscillators, making it easy to see what factors affect performance and how they can be traded off.
This work is the result of many years of research at the University of California, Los Angeles and years of industry experience. A balance between theory and design techniques makes this book suitable for researchers, graduate students, as well as practicing engineers. In Chapter 1, a general introduction and motivation to oscillators is presented. Chapter 2 summarizes the fundamentals of phase noise and timing jitter and discusses earlier works on oscillator’s phase noise analysis. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 analyze the physical mechanisms behind phase noise generation in current-biased and Colpitts oscillators. Chapter 5 discusses design trade-offs and new techniques in LC oscillator design that allows optimal design. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 discuss a topic that is typically ignored in oscillator design: flicker noise in LC oscillators. Finally, Chapter 8 is dedicated to the complete analysis of the role of varactors both in tuning and AM-FM noise conversion. |