Computationally Efficient Analysis of Microwave Injection-Locked Amplifiers

In this paper, some preliminary results on a novel approach to the analysis of injection-locked amplifiers are presented. The proposed method is based on a behavioral block modeling of the circuit in the fundamental-frequency dynamical phasor domain. The first-order exact perturbation refined treatment developed provides, in the end, explicit equations describing the entrained oscillation amplitude and phase dynamics. A secondary simplification then can be adopted in case of low-level injection, to determine a closed form expression for the locking bandwidth, generalizing the well known Adler’s one. By virtue of its semi-analytical nature, the proposed approach turns out to be much more efficient and less time consuming, for any design and optimization purpose, with respect to the use of conventional circuit simulators, even those operating in the frequency- and not in the time-domain.