Jitter Characterization of Fully-Micromechanical Thermal-Piezoresistive Oscillators

This work presents the first comprehensive report on jitter measurement of self-sustained fully electromechanical thermal-piezoresistive oscillators. Previously it was demonstrated that thermal-piezoresistive resonators can act as fully micromechanical oscillators without the need for sustaining electronic amplifier. However, the stability and jitter characteristics of such oscillators have not been studied before. It is demonstrated in this work that by gradually increasing the bias current of such oscillators, as the AC oscillation voltage amplitude increases, jitter characteristic improves. Three different thermal-piezoresistive oscillators were utilized for jitter characterization. Period jitter as low as 65ps (standard deviation) has been demonstrated for a 1.03MHz oscillator.