Low-Power MEMS-Based Pierce Oscillator Using a 61-MHz Capacitive-Gap Disk Resonator

A 61-MHz Pierce oscillator constructed in 0.35-μm CMOS technology and referenced to a polysilicon surface-micromachined capacitive-gap-transduced wineglass disk resonator has achieved phase noise marks of -119 dBc/Hz at 1-kHz offset and -139 dBc/Hz at far-from-carrier offsets. When divided down to 13 MHz, this corresponds to -132 dBc/Hz at 1-kHz offset from the carrier and -152 dBc/Hz far-from-carrier, sufficient for mobile phone reference oscillator applications, using a single MEMS resonator, i.e., without the need to array multiple resonators. Key to achieving these marks is a Pierce-based circuit design that harnesses a MEMS-enabled input-to-output shunt capacitance more than 100× smaller than exhibited by macroscopic quartz crystals to enable enough negative resistance to instigate and sustain oscillation while consuming only 78 μW of power - a reduction of ~4.5× over previous work. Increasing the bias voltage of the resonator by 1.25V further reduces power consumption to 43 μW at the cost of only a few decibels in far-from-carrier phase noise. This oscillator achieves a 1-kHz-offset figure of merit (FOM) of -231 dB, which is now the best among published chip-scale oscillators to date. A complete linear circuit analysis quantifies the influence of resonator input-to-output shunt capacitance on power consumption and predicts further reductions in power consumption via reduction of electrode-to-resonator transducer gaps and bond pad sizes. The demonstrated phase noise and power consumption posted by this tiny MEMS-based oscillator are attractive as potential enablers for low-power “set-and-forget” autonomous sensor networks and embedded radios.