2017/10/04 by Wang, Tianshi, Roychowdhury, Jaijeet
#FOS: Electrical engineering #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1710.02015
In this paper, we discuss the definition of Q factor for nonlinear oscillators. While available definitions of Q are often limited to linear resonators or oscillators with specific topologies, our definition is applicable to any oscillator as a figure of merit for its amplitude stability. It can be formulated rigorously and computed numerically from oscillator equations. With this definition, we calculate and analyze the Q factors of several oscillators of different types. The results confirm that the proposed Q formulation is a useful addition to the characterization techniques for oscillators.