Electrical – Using a varactor diode to tune a resonance frequency

lcrresonancevaricap

I think this is a question is some very elementary circuit design but…
I want to use a varactor diode to tune the resonance frequency of a resonator I have built.

I understand that a varactor is a voltage dependent capacitor, but I can't get my head around the correct configuration of using them.

Usually if I want to tune my resonator I insert a capacitor between the hot end of the resonator and the ground this will obviously shift the resonance frequency according to
$$\nu_0 = \frac{1}{2\pi \sqrt{L(C_p+C_{capacitor})}}$$

I want to do the same but with the Varactor diode, my current thinking feels very wrong as the DC voltage source is surely just going to go straight through the resonator and into ground.

I know this is basic but I am a little stuck!

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

Best Answer

The circuit you're intending to use is not one of those commonly found in actual devices – exactly because the L has (nearly) zero DC resistance, so a lot of current will flow through it due to the DC bias.

It's important to notice that your (R||L||C) resonant circuit is not usually useful in this constellation in isolation. If you want to use it as the resonating part of an oscillator, you'd typically have some kind of amplifying element that feeds energy back into that oscillator; since we're talking AC here, the coupling can usually be done through a capacitor, and that means that you can isolate the biasing; you might want to think more in terms of:

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

More common, however, is the configuration where the bias voltage is applied over two antiparallel diodes (from German wikipedia):

varicap based oscillator

Notice the choke in the bias voltage path – since the ideal voltage source has zero impedance, it would completely "swallow" any energy stuffed into your oscillator, and Lb avoids that.