Local Oscillator - Characteristics and Design Considerations

Presentation (pdf 2.4KB)

Local oscillators can be found in many segments, such as wireless infrastructure, tuner and ADC/DAC clock, etc. Most of the applications required that the local oscillator must be tunable. Therefore, in this seminar, we will focus on VCO, voltage control oscillator. Since the frequency of a VCO will drift without control, a phase lock loop is introduced to lock the VCO to the desired frequency. Hence, when we talk about local oscillators, we are referring to the whole PLL+VCO system design.

In this seminar, we will also see how the key design parameters, such as charge pump current, N-counter value and phase comparison frequency, etc affect the overall system performance like loop bandwidth, phase margin, lock time and spurs.

Topics covered in this online seminar include:

• Basics of Voltage control oscillator (VCO), Frequency Synthesizer and PLL (phase locked loop)
• Noise from VCO, synthesizer and PLL
• Noise & jitter analysis
• Design considerations