Computer aided design of quartz crystal oscillators

The latest development of a simulation program designed for quartz crystal oscillator analysis is presented in this paper. The simulator being developed uses the full nonlinear Barkhausen criterion method. It consists of finding the frequency /spl omega//sub 0/ and the amplitude u/sub 0/ which nullify both the real and imaginary parts of a characteristic complex polynomial P(u,j/spl omega/) describing the oscillator behavior. Most of the nonlinearities come from the amplifying transistor described by using large signal admittance parameters y(u) obtained by means of an analog circuit simulator (SPICE). This paper presents the method used to derive and code the characteristic polynomial coefficients. This method has been successfully implemented for a Colpitts oscillator and is currently being used to build an oscillator library covering the most widely used structures. The validity and the predictive power of the model have been checked experimentally and the comparison between experimental results and simulation is presented and discussed.<>