STABILITY ANALYSIS OF OSCILLATORS BASED ON A DELTA–SIGMA TOPOLOGY

D. Macii, P. Carbone, D. Petri

Abstract

The growing demand of mixed–signal integrated circuits encourages the research of Built-In Self-Test (BIST) techniques to achieve simpler and less expensive testing processes. High quality sinusoidal oscillators based on a Δ-Σ topology are an effective solution to perform the test of this kind of devices. Unfortunately, due to the in–loop 1–bit quantizer nonlinearity, several problems of stability have been observed. A stability analysis on the behavior of the oscillator based on a second order Δ-Σ modulator presented in [1] is described in this paper. In particular, it is shown that the oscillator is intrinsically unstable and its complete dynamics is very difficult to predict exactly. Finally, a possible stabilization strategy is proposed.

Keywords

BIST, oscillator, delta–sigma

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IMEKO TC

TC4 - Measurement of Electrical Quantities

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