WSB: Current and future trends in frequency generation circuits

In order to adapt to the highly competitive IC market, chip suppliers are racing to reduce the total chip count by integrating many functionalities onto a single IC. However, one of the few elements that escaped this integration and remains to be off-chip is the timing source. In both wireless and wired systems, the reference source requires varying degrees of accuracy and stability over time and temperature. More often these accuracy requirements can only be met by using externally compensated reference sources such as (TCXOS) or (VCXOS), which occupy a large fraction of the board space. Hence a large emphasis is placed on eliminating these components by either integrating their functionality on- chip or replacing them with a much smaller footprint solution. This workshop will review various aspects in the design of stable and low phase noise oscillator circuits. Solutions that are gaining more popularity such as (DCXOS), MEMS and self-referenced oscillators will also be presented.