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.