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E5500 Series Phase Noise Measurement Solutions

Data Sheets

Model E5505A Configurations

- Flexible set of measurements and configurations, widest offset range, and best reputation for the R&D workbench or production floor

• Measurements on one-port VCOs, DROs, crystal oscillators, and synthesizers and on two–port devices, including amplifiers and converters, plus CW, pulsed and spurious signals

• Absolute and residual phase noise, AM noise, and low level spurious signals

• Easy configuration for various measurement techniques, including PLL/reference source, residual and FM discriminator methods

• Wide offset range capability, from 0.01 Hz to 100 MHz

• Architecture combines standard instruments, phase noise components, and PC software flexibly, allowing reuse of assets (proprietary architectures are less flexible because the reference sources and analyzers selected can limit phase noise measurements)

• E5500 software enables many standalone instruments to work together within a system

Keysight E5500 Theory of Operation

The “phase detector with reference source” technique is the most general-purpose and cost-effective measurement approach to measure the single sideband (SSB) phase noise characteristic of oscillators. This technique demodulates the noise sidebands of the device-under-test (DUT) oscillator to a baseband signal for a fast, easy measurement using off-the-shelf baseband analyzers.

With the reference source and the DUT in steady state quadrature, the phase detector generates a baseband signal proportional to the phase difference of the two sources. When the noise characteristics of the reference source signal are less than the DUT signal noise characteristics, the resulting baseband noise signal is effectively that of the DUT.

A narrow-band phase-lock-loop forces the two-phase detector input signals into quadrature and allows the reference source to track DUT frequency drift for drift rates within the loop bandwidth. Noise fluctuations within the loop bandwidth are suppressed by the operation of the phase-lock-loop. This suppression effect can be independently measured, and the noise data corrected automatically by the measurement software. Noise fluctuations outside of the phase-lock-loop bandwidth are unaffected.

When the oscillator-under-test has a frequency output in the microwave frequency range, it is difficult to find suitable, low noise, microwave frequency sources to use as the necessary reference signal. In this case, the solution is to use a low-noise downconverter to translate the DUT microwave output frequency to a lower RF/IF frequency, allowing the use of the same low-noise RF reference sources described previously.

The phase noise of the RF reference or the microwave downconverter usually dominates the effective noise floor of this phase noise measurement. The noise contribution of the baseband test set is much lower than either and typically does not factor into the overall measurement noise floor.

Widest Measurement Coverage

The E5500 has been tailored to meet the extensive needs of engineers, providing the most flexible and best measurements at the lowest possible cost. The modular instrument architecture takes advantage of standalone instrumentation for superior frequency offset range, broadest capability, best sensitivity, and excellent overall value for phase noise measurements. The E5500’s low internal noise floor and measurement flexibility let you measure a wide variety of devices with one system.

Measure AM noise directly

The E5500 Series can automatically measure the AM noise of RF and microwave devices. The internal AM detector and DC blocking filter provided within Keysight’s N5500A-001 measures AM noise on carriers up to 26.5 GHz. AM noise of millimeter frequency devices can be measured with an external AM detector.

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