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Oscillator Architectures and Enhanced Frequency Synthesizer

A voltage controlled oscillator (VCO), that generates a periodic signal whose
frequency is tuned by a voltage, is a key building block in any integrated circuit systems.
A sine wave oscillator can be used for a built-in self testing where high linearity is
required. A bandpass filter (BPF) based oscillator is a preferred solution, and high
quality factor (Q-factor) is needed to improve the linearity. However, a stringent
linearity specification may require very high Q-factor, not practical to implement. To
address this problem, a frequency harmonic shaping technique is proposed. It utilizes a
finite impulse response filter improving the linearity by rejecting certain harmonics. A
prototype SC BPF oscillator with an oscillating frequency of 10 MHz is designed and
measurement results show that linearity is improved by 20 dB over a conventional
oscillator.
In radio frequency area, preferred oscillator structures are an LC oscillator and a
ring oscillator. An LC oscillator exhibits good phase noise but an expensive cost of an
inductor is disadvantageous. A ring oscillator can be built in standard CMOS process,
but suffers due to a poor phase noise and is sensitive to supply noise. A RC BPF
oscillator is proposed to compromise the above difficulties. A RC BPF oscillator at 2.5
GHz is designed and measured performance is better than ring oscillators when
compared using a figure of merit. In particular, the frequency tuning range of the
proposed oscillator is superior to the ring oscillator.
VCO is normally incorporated with a frequency synthesizer (FS) for an accurate
frequency control. In an integer-N FS, reference spur is one of the design concerns in
communication systems since it degrades a signal to noise ratio. Reference spurs can be
rejected more by either the lower loop bandwidth or the higher loop filter. But the
former increases a settling time and the latter decreases phase margin. An adaptive
lowpass filtering technique is proposed. The loop filter order is adaptively increased
after the loop is locked. A 5.8 GHz integer-N FS is designed and measurement results
show that reference spur rejection is improved by 20 dB over a conventional FS without
degrading the settling time. A new pulse interleaving technique is proposed and several
design modifications are suggested as a future work.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/148445
Date14 March 2013
CreatorsPark, Sang Wook
ContributorsSánchez-Sinencio, Edgar
Source SetsTexas A and M University
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf

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