KYOCERA's New Temperature-Compensated Crystal Oscillator Offers Industry's Lowest Phase Noise For 5G, Wi-Fi

Improves connection performance of smartphones and network equipment

Kyocera Corporation (President: Hideo Tanimoto) today unveiled a compact temperature-compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO) offering the industry's lowest phase noise*. Samples of Kyocera's KT1612 Series and KT2016 Series TCXOs are now available worldwide, with mass production planned to start in March 2020.

Increased communication speeds and data capacities required for new 5G and Wi-Fi technologies have brought about a shift toward multilevel modulation systems that send multiple signals to a single section of a single wavelength. However, since noise and frequency fluctuations can produce data errors, circuit designers seek compact TCXOs that can provide higher frequency stability with less degradation. In these applications, a TCXO has two important performance indices:

1. Phase noise: Amplitude and phase fluctuations due to inherent noise in the device; and
2. Phase jitter: Shifts and fluctuations in the time domain of the waveform

Kyocera's compact TCXO delivers an industry-leading, ultra-low phase noise of -168 dBc/Hz at 100kHz offset. In addition, it reduces phase jitter to 68 fs from 12kHz to 5MHz, resulting in greatly improved communication quality. These new benchmark performance levels were achieved using high-Q-value, high-quality, synthetic crystals grown at Kyocera's Yamagata Higashine Plant, combined with a crystal oscillator optimized by plasma chemical vaporization machining (CVM), an ultra-high-precision processing technology, and an oscillator circuit that suppresses noise.

Kyocera will continue to enhance its TCXO line with improved phase-noise characteristics to support better performance in smartphones and network equipment.

Specifications and temperature characteristics

Electrical characteristics

＜Sample data of phase noise characteristics＞　
Condition: Nominal frequency at 26MHz, temperature at +25℃

* Based on research by Kyocera. (as of October 31, 2019)