Dr. Ken Kundert Cadence Design Systems

Noise in Mixers, Oscillators, Samplers & Logic: An Introduction to Cyclostationary Noise

The proliferation of wireless and mobile products have dramatically increased the number and variety of low power, high performance electronic systems being designed. Noise is an important limiting factor in these systems. The noise generated is often strongly cyclostationary. This type of noise cannot be predicted using SPICE, nor is it well handled by traditional test equipment such as spectrum analyzers or noise figure meters, but it is available from the new RF simulators, such as SpectreRF.

The origins and characteristics of cyclostationary noise are described in a way that allows designers to understand the impact of cyclostationarity on their circuits. In particular, cyclostationary noise in time-varying systems (mixers), sampling systems (switched filters and sample/holds), thresholding systems (logic circuitry), and autonomous systems (oscillators) is discussed.

Bio
Dr. Ken Kundert is a fellow at Cadence Design Systems and for many years has been the principle architect of the Spectre circuit simulation family. As such, he has lead the development of Spectre, SpectreHDL, and SpectreRF, and initiated development of AMS Designer. He also played a key role in the development of Agilent's harmonic balance simulator and made substantial contributions to both the Verilog-AMS and VHDL-AMS languages. He has authored two books on circuit simulation, Steady-State Methods for Simulating Analog and Microwave Circuits in 1990 and The Designer's Guide to SPICE and Spectre in 1995, as well as over two dozen papers published in refereed conferences and journals.