ECE323 Lecture 9 Reference Standard Oscillator

We finished the last lecture by completing the schematic of a very good crystal oscillator, but without
any component values. Let’s start from there:

Q2

The transistor on the left is the oscillator transistor, in fact the oscillator will work just fine if we cut out
the 2nd transistor and just connect a 4.5v battery to ground from that point. But there is no way to
extract a sine wave. The oscillator frequency will also drift a bit as the 4.5v battery slowly dies. One
function of the 2nd transistor is to provide a 4.0v supply to the first transistor, stabilized over voltage
and temperature variations. Now is a good time to remind yourselves that reviewing the left side of
the schematic from the dc voltage and current standpoint, is something you want to do several times
before the take-home midterm so that you can easily do that problem and move on to the other three.

The other two functions of the 2nd transistor are to isolate the oscillator from any load variations, and
to amplify the oscillator signal to a useful level. Since we’ve already studied the oscillator and you will
be reviewing the dc operation of the two transistors, in this lecture we will focus exclusively on the ac
operation of the amplifier. For that, we start with the impedance presented by the amplifier transistor
emitter to the oscillator transistor collector. With 3mA flowing in the amplifier transistor and the base
grounded for ac, the impedance looking into the emitter is 1/gm or about 26W/3 ~ 9W. If 2mA flows in
the amplifier transistor, the impedance looking into the emitter is about 26/2 ~ 13W. So a reasonable
approximation to the load impedance presented by the amplifier to the collector of the oscillator is
10W. Compared with the other impedances in the oscillator circuit, that is very low, so we refer to this
particular oscillator topology as a Common Collector Colpitts Oscillator.

Note that the base of the amplifier transistor is at ac ground. Low frequencies (below a few hundred
kHz) are short circuited to ground by the 10uF electrolytic capacitor. But electrolytic capacitors are
notoriously bad as high frequency bypass capacitors, so we need a high frequency bypass capacitor
in parallel.

Where is the missing high frequency bypass capacitor? Some folks who have built this circuit have
noted that it is absent, and added a few hundred pF to ground from the base of amplifier transistor
Q2. But it isn’t needed, because, as we studied in ECE321, a zener diode has a large, heavily doped
PN junction, and the zener junction itself has 100pF or so capacitance. This is a good example of the
use of one component (the zener diode) to perform two necessary functions (voltage stabilization and
bypass capacitor). Electronic circuits are full of these double entendre. Enjoy them.
Amplifier Component Values

Now that we have set up the dc operating conditions of the transistors, we don’t need to consider
them any more. We can spend the rest of this lecture just looking at the circuitry from the amplifier
transistor collector to the output on the right:

9v

51W
6t trifilar
100nF FT-23-43
3dB
LP 10nF pad
out 50W
51W

You may recall from ECE321 that the gain of a common base transistor amplifier is approximately the
collector resistance divided by the emitter resistance. Or gmRL, whichever is much smaller than the
other. If they are nearly the same, it’s the parallel combination of the two--or about half of either one.
In either case, we are very interested in RL, the load resistance presented to the collector.

So one function of the circuit above, an all passive RLC network, is to transform the 50W load at the
output to an equivalent higher RL at the collector. A second function is to low-pass filter the output of
the oscillator so output signal is a better sine wave.

The 51W resistor and 100nF capacitor at the top of the circuit are left over from the dc bias circuitry,
and we can simply replace them with an ac short to ground to study the properties of the network.

50W
3dB
51W pad
50W

Now we have a purely passive network, with a 50W load on the right, a 50W 3dB pad (more on that
later) that makes it an even better 50W load, a dc blocking capacitor large enough that its capacitive
reactance is a fraction of an ohm and can be ignored, a 50W low-pass filter to suppress harmonics
but do nothing to the desired sine wave...in fact, the entire circuit is 50W all the way up to that strange
three inductor thing connected to ac ground. ...or maybe not so strange, since you studied trifilar
windings on ferrite cores earlier this quarter to understand diode ring mixers. This one looks exactly
the same: 3 identical windings on the same core, but it serves a different function.
The Trifilar AutoTransformer

You can figure out the function of the trifilar auto-transformer by setting up three windings and using
the rules in the Transformers tutorial here:

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~campbell/Transformers.pdf

But that puzzle would take the rest of this lecture, and I’d like to move on. You can do it later.

A Trifilar autotransformer effectively behaves as a 1:3 turns ratio conventional transformer. If you put
1v on the single turn, you get 3v across the 3 series turns. If you put 1A into the single turn node,
you get 1/3A out the other end of the 3 series turns. So the trifilar transformer acts as an impedance
transformer with ratio 3 2 = 9. Since the single turn is connected to 50W, the other end of the three
series windings is 9 x 50W = 450W. In our circuit, there is an additional 51W resistor in series with the
last winding, so the collector of transistor Q2 sees ~ 500W. That’s RL when we calculate gain...

...which we aren’t going to do. This amplifier has as its input the collector of an oscillator transistor,
and there is some sine wavish thing there. Sine wavish is probably more like a pure sine wave than
the “ratty sine wave” we have at the collector of our “simple oscillator that always works” but it may
be worse than your free-hand drawing of a sine wave on the white board in the circuit lounge. So it’s
already something other than a pure sine wave, and in the transistor with lots of gain we have a large
signal, so “small signal” approximations like gmRL aren’t really appropriate. So instead of predicting
gain using our small signal approximations, we build the circuit and measure the output with different
numbers of turns on the impedance transformer: bifilar, trifilar, and quadrafilar. At some point I must
have tried each of them and concluded that trifilar is about right for maximum output with a 9 to 12v
dc supply. You are encouraged to do that experiment when you have access to the lab.

As you progress through your career as a circuit designer, you will notice that folks who spend a lot of
time in the lab experimenting with their own designs develop a sense of when to move from models
and simulations to hardware experiments. This is particularly true when there is any non-linearity or
electromagnetic behavior. In this oscillator circuit, we have both non-linearity, and a trifilar inductor, a
magnetic component. So it should come as no surprise that your professor, with years of experience
in the lab attempting to make his designs work, has acquired significant humility along the way.

The fundamental rule of experimental physics is: “If you want to be absolutely certain of something,
only measure it once.” There are similar rules in other fields, for example, Parenting: “Never buy a
book on parenting by an author who has only one child *“

So just as we avoid doing simulations of complete oscillators, we avoid doing small signal analysis
on circuits that we know are non-linear. My MSEE student Katlin Dahn was able to build an oscillator
that outperformed all the PSU test equipment by directly using her brain and the scientific method in
lab, rather than immersing herself in simulations and texts on oscillator design ahead of time.

*people with more than one child don’t have time to write books
Low-Pass Filter and 3dB pad

Between the trifilar 9:1 impedance transformer and the 50W output are a 3 element pi-network low-
pass filter and a 3dB pad. Each of these deserves some discussion. You have probably encountered
low-pass filter design in prior courses, but this is an ancient form that works exceptionally well and
needs to be in your design quiver, along with the oscillator that always works. It’s not Butterworth,
Chebychev, Bessel or any of those other amazing special mathematical functions. It is simply equal
element value. It has two capacitors to ground, and a series inductor, each with reactance equal to
the impedance of the circuit. The two capacitors in the circuit below have -j50W reactance, and the
inductor has +j50W reactance. You can use expressions from your prior courses to calculate values
for any oscillator frequency, but for our example at 24 MHz they are 130pF and 332nH.
9v

51W
6t trifilar
100nF FT-23-43
3dB
LP 10nF pad
500W out 50W
51W 18W

330W 330W

Since it’s a low-pass filter, there is no penalty for moving the passband up just a little, so we can use
standard value 120pF capacitors, and wind a 300nH inductor on a little T-25-6 yellow toroid core.

A 3dB pad is a truly wonderful component that also belongs in your quiver of useful circuits. It is a
nearly perfectly amplifier, with a gain less than 1. In fact, a 3dB pad has a gain of 0.707, half the input
power appears at the output, and the other half warms up the resistors. You could do the same thing
with a simple voltage divider, but a 3dB pad has the advantage that, when one end is connected to
50W, the other end also looks like a perfect 50W resistor.
Let’s fill in all the component values for our really quite good reference quartz crystal oscillator:
9v
51W
100nF
6t trifilar
3.9k FT-23-43
on Thursday we 10k 3dB
300nH 10nF pad
will mess with that Q2
270pF 33W Q1 out 50W
input variable cap 51W 18W
and turn this into a 10k
voltage variable 22W
10uF
120pF 120pF
frequency crystal 510W 330W 330W
oscillator: a VCXO 270pF 4.7v Q1, Q2 2N3904
...nice. Done