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An analytical formulation for phase noise in MEMS oscillators.


Type

Article

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Authors

Agrawal, Deepak 

Abstract

In recent years, there has been much interest in the design of low-noise MEMS oscillators. This paper presents a new analytical formulation for noise in a MEMS oscillator encompassing essential resonator and amplifier nonlinearities. The analytical expression for oscillator noise is derived by solving a second-order nonlinear stochastic differential equation. This approach is applied to noise modeling of an electrostatically addressed MEMS resonator-based square-wave oscillator in which the resonator and oscillator circuit nonlinearities are integrated into a single modeling framework. By considering the resulting amplitude and phase relations, we derive additional noise terms resulting from resonator nonlinearities. The phase diffusion of an oscillator is studied and the phase diffusion coefficient is proposed as a metric for noise optimization. The proposed nonlinear phase noise model provides analytical insight into the underlying physics and a pathway toward the design optimization for low-noise MEMS oscillators.

Description

Keywords

MEMS, resonator, oscillator, nonlinear effects, bifurcation, stochastic integration, phase diffusion, amplitude noise, phase noise

Journal Title

IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0885-3010
1525-8955

Volume Title

61

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Sponsorship
The authors would like to thank the UK-Indian Education and Research Initiative (grant SA06-250) and the Cambridge Trusts for funding support.