Low Phase Noise Wine-Glass Oscillator Realized Using Enhanced Support Transducer Design

An array of short mechanical couplers scheme to realize a support transducer enabled Wine-glass resonator/oscillator exhibiting a quality factor ($Q$) of 17,000 and an oscillator Phase Noise (PN) meeting the GSM spec. at 1 kHz and 1 MHz offsets has been demonstrated in this work. A 20.3-MHz Wine-glass resonator fabricated using the MEMSCAP platform is used to implement the oscillator. The meticulous structural and material engineering aspect of the resonator improves the quality factor of the design from 9,500 to 17,000, making the resonator an ideal candidate for high-end oscillator applications. An attenuator and phase control methodology along with commercially available amplifiers has been used to realize a low phase noise oscillator with a PN of −134.1 dBc/Hz and −152.3 dBc/Hz at 1 kHz and 1 MHz offsets respectively while divided down to GSM's 13 MHz.