Low Jitter Thin-Film Piezoelectric-on-Substrate Oscillators

In this paper we report a 27MHz oscillator with very low cycle-to-cycle jitter (7 psec standard deviation) based on a thin-film piezoelectric-on-substrate (TPoS) resonator driven beyond the bifurcation point. For the first time, our results seem to provide experimental validation for the speculated suppression of overall oscillator circuit noise through the operation of the resonator beyond the bifurcation. In our work the dependency of jitter on the resonator characteristics (i.e. quality factor and motional impedance) and oscillation power is studied. A phase-noise as low as -130dBc/Hz @ 1kHz offset from carrier is measured for these TPoS oscillators which is comparable with the results reported for quartz oscillators.