[sdiy] Varactor diode based additive oscillator?

cheater cheater cheater00 at gmail.com
Mon Apr 5 12:50:49 CEST 2010


Hi guys,
I was thinking about the possibility of making a stretched-harmonic
oscillator again. I came across a mention of varactor-based harmonic
oscillators. I thought that since a varactor isn't a real capacitor,
its capacitance must be somehow non-linear with rleation to... well,
something. After a quick search I came across this:
http://www.skyworksinc.com/uploads/documents/200824A.pdf

Page 3, the second graph is capacitance vs bias voltage of a
hyperabrupt varactor which shows a high non-linearity.

You could probably make a voltage-controlled Wien bridge oscillator
around a varactor like that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien_bridge_oscillator

Which is basically a tuned self-resonating band pass filter. It has
two resistances at R ohms and two capacitances at C farads.

In the case of making the capacitance a varactor like in the pdf
above, the voltage-frequency response would be non-linear. Looking at
the part count you could make multiple such cores easily (say, 8-10)
to work in an additive scheme, and drive them from a single voltage
source; then each core could get a fixed voltage offset. The control
voltage would basically control where on the nonlinearity the separate
cores would be, therefore spacing the harmonics at different
intervals. Then the R ohm resistances could all be controlled to be
the same resistance via, say, a transistor-based VC resistor scheme.
This would be the actual frequency control.

What do you guys think of this idea?

On the other hand, maybe the non-linearity of a varactor could be
somehow used 'in itself' to make a single Wien bridge oscillator
anharmonic, but this is beyond my imagination.

Cheers
D.



More information about the Synth-diy mailing list