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Entry  Wed Dec 8 22:16:00 2010, Zach, Electronics, GYRO, EOM resonant circuit test eom_circuit_schematic.pngeom_res_circuit_tf.png
    Reply  Thu Dec 9 23:07:46 2010, Zach, Electronics, GYRO, EOM resonant circuit test EOM_res_circuit_TF_12_9_10.png
Message ID: 1202     Entry time: Thu Dec 9 23:07:46 2010     In reply to: 1197
Author: Zach 
Type: Electronics 
Category: GYRO 
Subject: EOM resonant circuit test 

I modified the circuit by replacing the inductor with a slightly smaller one (actually, we only had ones that were too small in the EE shop, so I soldered two of them together in series). I tuned the new inductors so that the resonance frequency was 33 MHz. Below is a plot.

EOM_res_circuit_TF_12_9_10.png

Again, this plot has had the -34 dB of (measured) attenuation from the two in-line 20-ohm BNC attenuators that were used between the source and the resonant circuit subtracted out to reflect the true magnitude.

I took the same measurement using a (MiniCircuits) 50-ohm terminator in place of the circuit and EOM and verified that the result was 0 dB in broadband, as it should be given the measurement setup. What I don't understand is that---as is explained in the elog thread between Stephanie and Koji linked below---the magnitude should be given by 2Z/(50+ Z), where Z is the impedance of the device under testing. The impedance should be >> 50 ohm on resonance, so the magnitude of the peak should be something like 6 dB. I get 11.4 dB, which doesn't seem right unless there is a factor of two missing here somehow.

 

I want to be sure of the impedance before I hook everything up, so I have restored the experiment to the standard setup until I am.

 

Quote:

 I built a simple resonant circuit for use with the EOM consisting of:

  1. A 1:16 turn ratio RF transformer
  2. A tunable inductor
  3. That's it

The schematic of the full circuit including the EOM is:

eom_circuit_schematic.png

The principle of operation is that the impedance Z of the LC circuit in parallel with the secondary transformer coil becomes very high on resonance. The transformer makes this impedance look like Z/(162) to an input signal, and the circuit is optimized when this value is 50 Ω so that the impedance is matched and there is maximal power coupling. Meanwhile, the voltage is stepped up by a factor of 16, so the ultimate result is a gain on resonance. The transformer is useful in its own right in the case where the load impedance is not adjustable, in order to match this with the input impedance. In that case, one chooses the appropriate turn ratio to make Z/n2 = 50 Ω (for RF applications). In our case, we make Z as high as possible, and in doing so we need to increase n, which in turn increases the voltage gain---pretty neat!

The measurement setup is the same as here. Below is the measured voltage transfer function, with the effect of the attenuators from the source to the circuit (to avoid power reflection, as detailed in the linked post) subtracted out.

eom_res_circuit_tf.png

 

It seems like either the inductor I am using is not quite what it says it is, or that the capacitance of the EOM is not the roughly 12 pF it is supposed to be. The latter is not very likely as I got roughly the same resonant frequency of ~26 MHz when simulating the EOM with a mica capacitor. In any case, I am going to replace the inductor with a slightly smaller one and try to adjust the frequency to 33 MHz.

I wanted to plot the LISO prediction for this circuit along with the measured transfer function, but I am running into trouble with getting the Q quite right. The resonant frequency and gain come out to about the same, but the shape was much broader. I realized that I had the coupling efficiency of the mutual inductance line set to unity (ideal), and when I changed this to 0.9 the Q magically increased, resulting in a very sharp spike. I am not sure if I am doing something wrong, but I will either figure it out or just use something to model it analytically.

 

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