An Experimental Method to Extract the Phase-Sensitivity of Oscillators to Noise Perturbations

This paper describes an original experimental procedure to extract the phase-sensitivity of oscillators to noise perturbations. The proposed method relies on measuring the width of the locking ranges over which the oscillator's response synchronizes with injected small-amplitude signals. It is shown that this sensitivity function can be employed to accurately predict how inner noise sources are transferred to output phase-noise and jitter. The extraction procedure is applied to a relaxation oscillator that exhibits a strongly nonlinear behavior.