Device Shot Noise and Saturation Effects on Oscillator Phase Noise

Oscillator phase noise is an important factor in designing radio frequency (RF) communications hardware. Phase noise directly contributes to adjacent-channel interference and an increase in bit error rate (BER).

Understanding the operation of an oscillator can help with the oscillator design process. Also, the understanding of the noise processes within an oscillator can add insight to the design process, allowing an intelligent low-noise design. It will be shown that although simulation software can be helpful, the understanding of the oscillator operation is a valuable tool in the design process.

Oscillator design will be discussed, and then the noise processes of the oscillator will be investigated. A new method of decomposing shot noise into in-phase and quadrature components will be discussed. The noise processes discussed for a non-saturating bipolar junction transistor (BJT) Colpitts oscillator will be extended to the case of a saturating BJT Colpitts oscillator. This new method gives insight into the design of low-noise oscillators, and provides guidelines for design of low-noise oscillators. Example oscillators will support the theory and low-noise design guidelines. It will be seen that although designing an oscillator to saturate can provide a stable output level over a wide bandwidth, the added noise production may degrade the performance of the oscillator through both a lower effective Q and restricted signal level compared to the noise.