A pullable overtone crystal oscillator (201) includes an impedance buffer (217) for buffering an input impedance (109) to an amplifier stage (203). This structure enables construction of an overtone oscillator with increased pullability because a drive level of a crystal (221) can be set independent of the input impedance (109) of the amplifier stage (203).

The aging and radiation induced frequency shifts of quartz crystal oscillrs are minimized by using oscillator circuits in which the DC voltage applied to the quartz crystal is about zero. This results in reduced movement of impurity ions which generally cause such shifts.

A stabilized oscillation circuit includes a bias circuit which controllably biases a bipolar-transistor-driven crystal oscillator circuit. The bipolar-transistor-driven crystal oscillator circuit is a modified version of a conventional transistor-driven oscillator, such as a Hartley, Pierce or Colpitts-type circuit. The bias circuit includes a first current providing a reference current through a Schottky diode and a pair of bipolar transistors. The bipolar-transistor-driven crystal oscillator circuit includes an input and an output, where the input of the bipolar-transistor-driven crystal oscillator circuit is coupled to the bias circuit. The bipolar-transistor-driven crystal oscillator circuit includes a second current through a second bipolar transistor. The second current tracks the reference current so that the output of the bipolar-transistor-driven oscillator circuit is substantially constant over variations in ambient temperature.

A fully integrated, adjustable oscillator circuit for use with a crystal is disclosed in which a crystal oscillator, such as a Pierce oscillator, is arranged to utilize a tuning network that includes at least one integrated varactor (voltage-variable-capacitor) as a shunt element for providing at least one type of adjustment of the oscillating signal. More than one type of adjustment can be provided by including a bank of varactors for each of the shunt elements of the tuning network, in which various individual varactors are selected in binary (on-off) fashion to effect digital as well as analog adjustment of the crystal oscillator.

A crystal-stabilized integrated-circuit oscillator which uses a filtered analog coupling to automatically disable the bias current to an auxiliary gain after startup. Positive feedback is used to ensure that the switchover is completed once it starts. Thus the device sizes and biases of the primary gain stage can be selected for very low-power operation, while assuring that the oscillator will always start-up whenever poser is valid.