TY - JOUR
T1 - L- And X-Band Dual-Frequency Synthesizer Utilizing Lithium Niobate RF-MEMS and Open-Loop Frequency Dividers
AU - Kourani, Ali
AU - Yang, Yansong
AU - Gong, Songbin
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received July 23, 2020; accepted December 24, 2020. Date of publication January 4, 2021; date of current version April 26, 2021. This work was supported by the NSF SpecEES program. (Corresponding author: Ali Kourani.) The authors are with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 USA (e-mail: kourani2. . .edu). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TUFFC.2020.3048929
Publisher Copyright:
© 1986-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2021/5
Y1 - 2021/5
N2 - This article presents an 8.6-GHz oscillator utilizing the third-order antisymmetric overtone ( A}_{{3} ) in a lithium niobate (LiNbO3) radio frequency microelectromechanical systems (RF-MEMS) resonator. The oscillator consists of an acoustic resonator in a closed loop with cascaded RF tuned amplifiers (TAs) built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) RF general purpose (GP) 65-nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS). The TAs bandpass response, set by on-chip inductors, satisfies Barkhausen's oscillation conditions for A}_{{3} while suppressing the fundamental and higher order resonances. Two circuit variations are implemented. The first is an 8.6-GHz standalone oscillator with a source-follower buffer for direct 50- Ω -based measurements. The second is an oscillator-divider chain using an on-chip three-stage divide-by-two frequency divider for a 1.1-GHz output. The standalone oscillator achieves a measured phase noise of -56, -113, and -135 dBc/Hz at 1 kHz, 100 kHz, and 1 MHz offsets from an 8.6-GHz output while consuming 10.2 mW of dc power. The oscillator also attains a figure-of-merit of 201.6 dB at 100-kHz offset, surpassing the state-of-the-art (SoA) oscillators-based electromagnetic (EM) and RF-MEMS. The oscillator-divider chain produces a phase noise of -69.4 and -147 dBc/Hz at 1 kHz and 1 MHz offsets from a 1075-MHz output while consuming 12 mW of dc power. Its phase noise performance also surpasses the SoA L -band phase-locked loops (PLLs). With further optimization, this work can enable low-power multistandard wireless transceivers featuring high speed, high sensitivity, and high selectivity in small-form factors.
AB - This article presents an 8.6-GHz oscillator utilizing the third-order antisymmetric overtone ( A}_{{3} ) in a lithium niobate (LiNbO3) radio frequency microelectromechanical systems (RF-MEMS) resonator. The oscillator consists of an acoustic resonator in a closed loop with cascaded RF tuned amplifiers (TAs) built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) RF general purpose (GP) 65-nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS). The TAs bandpass response, set by on-chip inductors, satisfies Barkhausen's oscillation conditions for A}_{{3} while suppressing the fundamental and higher order resonances. Two circuit variations are implemented. The first is an 8.6-GHz standalone oscillator with a source-follower buffer for direct 50- Ω -based measurements. The second is an oscillator-divider chain using an on-chip three-stage divide-by-two frequency divider for a 1.1-GHz output. The standalone oscillator achieves a measured phase noise of -56, -113, and -135 dBc/Hz at 1 kHz, 100 kHz, and 1 MHz offsets from an 8.6-GHz output while consuming 10.2 mW of dc power. The oscillator also attains a figure-of-merit of 201.6 dB at 100-kHz offset, surpassing the state-of-the-art (SoA) oscillators-based electromagnetic (EM) and RF-MEMS. The oscillator-divider chain produces a phase noise of -69.4 and -147 dBc/Hz at 1 kHz and 1 MHz offsets from a 1075-MHz output while consuming 12 mW of dc power. Its phase noise performance also surpasses the SoA L -band phase-locked loops (PLLs). With further optimization, this work can enable low-power multistandard wireless transceivers featuring high speed, high sensitivity, and high selectivity in small-form factors.
KW - 5G
KW - lithium niobate (LiNbO)
KW - microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)
KW - oscillator
KW - overtone
KW - phase noise
KW - synthesizers
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U2 - 10.1109/TUFFC.2020.3048929
DO - 10.1109/TUFFC.2020.3048929
M3 - Article
C2 - 33395392
AN - SCOPUS:85099212733
SN - 0885-3010
VL - 68
SP - 1994
EP - 2004
JO - IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control
JF - IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control
IS - 5
M1 - 9312619
ER -