A ceramic resonator is an electrical component that generates energy when compressed. It can be used as a frequency reference in electronic oscillators and for intermediate frequency amplifier stages in radio receivers. It has three terminals and requires a voltage gain greater than 1 to start oscillating.
A ceramic resonator is an electrical component that has a series-resonant and a parallel-resonant center frequency. It has a piezoelectric characteristic that causes the ceramic material to generate a small amount of electrical energy when subjected to electromechanical expansion and compression. The resulting mechanical energy component produces the electrical component and vice versa, and the result is a complex reactance leading to the resonance observed as a characteristic of having a central frequency. Materials such as lead and zirconium titanate have a piezoelectric ceramic characteristic.
Oscillators are electronic circuits that generate periodic waveforms. The ceramic resonator can be used as a frequency reference in the electronic oscillator, where the accuracy of the resulting frequency is not as high as in the crystal oscillator. The frequency error for the ceramic resonator circuit can reach 5%, while that for the crystal oscillator is less than 0.1%.
The ceramic resonator can also be used for intermediate frequency (IF) amplifier stages, found in heterodyne radio receivers that derive a common IF to receive a sub-band of frequencies. For example, a radio receiver tuned to 1,000 kilohertz (kHz) or 1,000 cycles per second may generate a local oscillator frequency of 1.455 kHz so that the difference is 455 kHz, which is a typical IF frequency. To receive a 1.500 kHz signal, the local oscillator is tuned to 1.955 kHz and the resulting difference is still 455 kHz. This ceramic resonator is tuned or clipped to resonate at approximately 455 kHz and will serve a sub-band such as 550 to 1,600 kHz as in a typical amplitude modulation (AM) band.
A typical ceramic resonator has three terminals. The two main terminals are on each wide side of a thin ceramic material, while the center terminal is usually connected to the thin side and can either be grounded or used to trap the signal in the rest of the oscillator circuit. There are, however, ceramic resonators and crystal resonators with only two terminals.
The amplifiers are the active parts of the oscillator. The ratio of the output voltage to the input voltage of an amplifier is known as the voltage gain, which depends on the frequency of interest. Very few amplifiers will maintain constant gain over a wide range of frequencies. When a ceramic resonator controls the frequency of the oscillator, the voltage gain at the frequency of the ceramic resonator must be greater than 1. If the voltage gain is less than 1, the amplifier will not start oscillating.
In electronics, design amplifiers and oscillators have very common components. With design flaws, some amps can be very close to swinging. Meanwhile, some oscillators may simply stop oscillating and behave like idle amplifiers. Ideally, amplifiers have no output when there is no input signal.
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