Nuevas técnicas de simulación y optimización de circuitos osciladores y lazos de enganche en fase de microondas

Resumen

The objective of this work is the development of techniques for the simulation and optimization of the design of microwave oscillator circuits and phase-locked loops. The intention of these techniques is that they can be used by the designer to optimize the features of these kinds of circuits during the design stage. For this reason, a lot of effort has been put along this thesis to ensure that the techniques can be used in combination with commercial microwave circuit simulators. In the case of the oscillator circuits, initially, their features have been optimized when used as voltage controlled oscillators (VCO). In this way, different techniques are proposed for the computer aided design of these circuits. The first technique allows setting the operation frequency band for specific values of the tuning voltage. The second technique imposes a linear frequency-voltage characteristic with the aid of an auxiliary generator. To follow this characteristic, the circuit is solved in terms of an ideal capacitance, synthesized, at a later stage, with the tuning varactor embedded in a linear network. In the third technique, the oscillator response to a sawtooth input, used to generate a chirp signal, is improved, eliminating spurious frequencies, not observable in steady state. To illustrate the techniques, a VCO operating in the C-band has been optimized and used to generate a chirp signal with low nonlinear frequency distortion. The injection-pulling phenomenon in oscillator circuits has been also analyzed. Injection pulling by interference signals is an undesired phenomenon in front-end oscillators, which causes a shift of the oscillation frequency and degrades the output spectrum. A semi-analytical formulation for the insightful analysis of injection-pulling phenomena in the presence of a modulated carrier or chirp signal is presented. The formulation enables an efficient analysis of interference problems difficult to simulate with harmonic balance or standard envelope transient. It allows the modification of the original design in order to reduce the injection pulling to the desired levels. The techniques have been applied to an oscillator at 6 GHz. Considering the problems found in commercial software to simulate the phase noise characteristic of coupled oscillator topologies, a numerical technique for the determination of the phase-noise spectrum of free-running oscillators is presented. The technique is based on envelope transient and can be applied to any commercial simulator on which this analysis method is available. The main advantage of the technique is that it allows simulating the near carrier phase noise spectrum, including possible resonances. The elements providing the oscillator phase-noise spectrum are obtained from envelope-transient simulations of low-computational cost. Comparisons are performed between the presented technique and other existing techniques, such as the carrier modulation approach. The technique has been successfully tested on the simulation of the near carrier phase noise spectrum of an oscillator circuit at 6.3 GHz. Finally, a preliminary study has been carried out to combine the use of Volterra series with the envelope transient technique for the simulation of oscillator transients. Regarding the phase-locked loops, in this thesis, harmonic-balance (HB) and envelope-transient formulations of coupled phase-locked loops (CPLLs) are presented. The CPLL has the added difficulty of its autonomous behavior since no reference oscillator is present. The new formulation takes into account the autonomy of the system, introducing a special set of state variables, which depend on the autonomous frequencies. The hysteresis phenomenon in CPLLs is analyzed in detail, efficiently obtaining the pull-in and hold-in ranges through HB. The pole analysis of the perturbed HB system enables an accurate prediction of instabilities and resonances. Due to the CPLL autonomy, there exists an inherent noise accumulation effect. This effect is taken into account, analyzing the perturbation in terms of accumulation and deviation components. The envelope formulation allows simulating the CPLL behavior in presence of modulation signals. The influence of the stability of the steady-state solution on the modulated signals is investigated. The simulation results have been successfully compared with the measurements in a manufactured CPLL system at 2 GHz.