Extremely low thermal noise floor, high power oscillators using surface transverse wave devices

This paper presents state-of-the-art results on 1-GHz surface transverse wave (STW) oscillators running at extremely high loop power levels. The high-Q single-mode STW resonators used in these designs have an insertion loss of 3.6 dB, an unloaded Q of 8000, a residual PM noise of -142 dBc/Hz at a 1-Hz carrier offset, and operate at an incident power of up to +31 dBm in the loop. Other low-Q STW resonators and coupled resonator filters (CRF), with insertion losses in the 5-9 dB range, can conveniently handle power levels in excess of two Watts. These devices were incorporated into voltage controlled oscillators (VCO's) running from a 9.6-V de source and provide an RF output power of +23 dBm at an RF/dc efficiency of 28%. Their tuning range was 750 kHz and the PM noise floor was -180 dBc/Hz. The oscillators, stabilized with the high Q devices and using specially designed AB-class power amplifiers, delivered an output power of +29 dBm and exhibited a PM noise floor of -184 dBc/Hz and a 1-Hz phase noise level of -17 dBc/Hz. The 1-Hz phase noise level was improved to -33 dBc/Hz using a commercially available loop amplifier. In this case, the output power was +22 dBm. In all cases studied, the loop amplifier was found to be the factor limiting the close-to-carrier oscillator phase noise performance.