Impact of non-quasi-static effects on 1/f3 phase noise in a 1.9-to-2.6 GHz oscillator

This work provides a comprehensive discussion of flicker noise up-conversion in current-biased oscillators. It is shown that the excess phase noise mostly arises from an AM-to-PM conversion due to the presence of a large capacitance at the tail node. During the study, a significant discrepancy has also emerged between measurements and simulations. A first attempt to explain this discrepancy is proposed, which takes into account the distributed nature of the flicker-noise source in the switching transistor pair.