Power Performance and Spurious Frequencies Analysis of Composite Right-/Left-Handed (CRLH) Distributed Oscillators

This paper concerns the analysis of the performance of a Composite Right-/Left-Handed (CRLH) distributed oscillator. In order to increase its output power, a modification of the standard configuration is proposed. The basic idea is to combine the signals from the two output ports of the structure by means of a Wilkinson combiner, so obtaining a single output generator. The power performance of the conventional two output oscillator and the power performance of the new configuration are numerically compared by changing the number of employed transistors. The same procedure is adopted to analyze the amplitude of the higher order harmonics in the generated signals as a function of the number of active elements. On the basis of simulated data an increase of the output power, together with a second harmonic reduction, is expected for the single output oscillator with respect to the standard CRLH topology. Experimental results fully confirm these numerical predictions.