REFERENCE PROGRAMMABLE OSCILLATOR CHIP FOR TELECOM APPLICATIONS (ARTES AT 5C.541) - EXPRO+

Objective: The activity objective is to design, manufacturing and test a high-performance programmable reference oscillator basedon microelectromechanical (MEMS) resonator operating in the 10 - 500 MHz range to serve as a reference oscillator or to attend directly as local oscillator the lower frequency range for telecom application.Targeted Improvements: - Enabling a European or Canadian source of a MEMS oscillator chip suitable for system on chip (SoC) integration.- Size, weight and power reduction by several orders of magnitude versus current technology of quartz OCXO.- Increase of fractional-N frequency generation by a factor of more than5.Description:Current telecom satellite payload equipment used mainly quartz-based oscillators for clock generation reference signals, used for track-and-hold amplifiers and digital-to-analogue (DAC) and analogue-to-digital (ADC) blocks in direct conversion (zero-IF or homodyne) frequency converters; for I-Q demodulator blocks in fully digital beamforming networks; and in double conversion super heterodyne frequency converters local oscillators (LOs) at different carrier frequencies. However, European sources of quartz-based oscillatorsare becoming more limited, and these solutions are expensive, with a form factor and power consumption that becomes challenging when incorporating into highly integrated payloads. Current state-of-art oscillators based on microelectromechanical(MEMS) resonators display competitive phase noise and frequency stability performance compared to quartz-based solutions, but thereare no European or Canadian sources of such products. Important advantages of such MEMS resonators compared to quartz-based oscillatorcan be seen, where MEMS achieves performance in between the Temperature Controlled Crystal Oscillator (TCXO) and Oven ControlledCrystal Oscillators (OCXOs) but with the advantage of their extremely small form factor, low power consumption and integration capability with Silicon process. One more important aspect is that the MEMS fundamentalmode frequency can be much higher than that of aQuartz crystal, whereas cost reduction is expected at lower frequencies and better performance at higher frequencies.This activity will design, manufacture of an engineering model oscillator chip based on European microelectromechanical technology in the 10 and500 MHz frequency range. The performance shall be suitable for a range of application scenarios in telecom payloads. The engineering model chip shall be built and tested in a critical environment, including thermal test