With the emergence of multi-standard and cognitive radios, the need for reconfigurable RF circuits increased. Such circuits require wide-band quadrature voltage controlled oscillators (QVCOs) to provide the local oscillator (LO) signal for up and down conversion. Wide-band QVCOs performance has lagged behind their narrowband VCO counterparts and numerous circuit techniques have been introduced to bridge the gap. This dissertation presents techniques that have been used to implement wide-band reconfigurable QVCOs with focus on dual-resonance based circuits. System and circuit analysis are performed to understand the tuning-range, phase noise, and power tradeoffs and to consider quadrature phase errors. An 8.8-15.0 GHz actively coupled QVCO and a 13.8-20GHz passively coupled QVCO are presented. Both oscillators employ dual-resonance to achieve extended tuning ranges. Impulse sensitivity functions were used to study the impact of different passive and active device noises on the overall phase noise performance of the dual-resonance oscillator and the actively and passively coupled quadrature oscillators. The quadrature phase error due to the different architecture parameters were investigated for the actively and passively coupled quadrature oscillators. The advantages of using switched capacitor tuning as a major part of passive tuning are identified, and the advantage of employing switches with large bandwidths, such as those associated with phase change materials, is mathematically quantified. Furthermore, a novel method for accurate off chip phase error measurement using discrete components and phase shifters that does not require calibration is introduced.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:cmu.edu/oai:repository.cmu.edu:dissertations-1739 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Creators | Khairi, Ahmad B. |
| Publisher | Research Showcase @ CMU |
| Source Sets | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations |
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