Temperature Drift Compensation Technique for a Hybrid LTCC Oscillator at 20 GHz

A temperature drift compensation method for a K-band LTCC hybrid voltage-controlled oscillator is presented. After an initial review of the vertically integrated resonator structure, an extracted temperature drift profile of the ceramic substrate is utilized to estimate the temperature dependence of the oscillation frequency of the entire circuit. Adding a low sensitivity tuning structure combined with a low complexity thermistor-network, the temperature shift can be significantly reduced from +/- 50 MHz to about +/- 5 MHz in an interval of 50 K, entirely compensating the drift at around room temperature. Finally, the impact of the additional tuning structure on the phase noise performance is analyzed.