Customer Reviews

The Design of Low Noise Oscillators

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am so glad I finally found this book. For an RF IC designer it is a blessing to find a book that answers all his questions about oscillator design and noise issues. It is sometimes so hard to fingure out how to choose the optimum topology and design parameters. A lot of the work done on oscillator noise is either too theoretical that no insight can be obtained, or too empirical and case specific. This books helps a great deal. It has the right balance between the theory and experiments. The approach is completely new, intuitive and at the same time accurate. This is an excellent book if you are interested in oscillator design.

This is the newest and most complete analysis of VCO noise to this date. Hajimiri and Lee's new approach to noise modeling has rendered previous work obsolete. It clarifies a large number of highly debated issues about VCO noise and provides tangible design guidelines that can be used to optimize the noise performance of integrated VCOs. I enjoyed it a lot and highly recommend it to anyone tired of ad hoc analysis and empirical design of VCOs.

This book approaches the oscillator design and optimization problem by placing a lot of emphasis on phase noise. It gives a complete overview of authors approach to modeling of phase noise. It uses this approach to optimize the performance of integrated resonator based and ring oscillators. It emphasizes silicon integrated circuit design which is usually limited by the low quality factor of inductors. One deficiency is lack of any information on design for minimum spurious response and harmonics.

Save your money, just get the papers on the subject published by the authors in the Journal of Solid State Circuits. There is not really enough material for a book. To extend the discussion from CMOS oscillators to ALL oscillator design is a bit of a stretch. Other materials (i.e. GaAS, InP) exhibit different phase noise characteristics.

The ISF is only valid if the perturbation is small, which limits the practicality of the theory.
ISF also relies heavily on simulation which makes the theory more heuristic and less analytic.

I am truly impressed with this book. I had heard about this work from some colleagues at work but did not have the time to buy and read it till now. I work on oscillators but I have not learned so much about them in one sitting before reading this book. This is certainly for people who are tired of the same old stuff being said over and over. The approach is truly novel and the delivery is excellent. I give it my unequivocal five star. Once you read it, you say to your self: why didn't I think of this.

This is a very interesting book based on the recent developements at Stanford. It introduces a lot of new concept useful to RF, Analog and digital IC designers.

Thougt the introduced phase-noise model is interesting the underlying s.c. "sensitivity functions" cannot generally be calculated analytically in practice. Thies means, and the authors suggest it, that this function is to be tetermined by computer-simulation, which of course drastically reduces the theorys usefullness for practical design purpose. To keep it short: This book is for pure theorists.