Rotary Traveling-Wave Oscillators, Analysis and Simulation

Rotary traveling-wave oscillators (RTWOs) are a new transmission-line based approach to gigahertz rate oscillators. This paper presents the fundamental theory of RTWOs in both the weakly nonlinear and strongly nonlinear regions of operation, including their multimode characteristics, quality factor, nonlinearity, and edge rate of the oscillating waveform. Finally we use the theory to derive analytic expressions for thermally induced phase noise. Our theoretical results are then compared with accurate simulations.