Low-power direct digital frequency synthesis for wireless communications

Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizer (DDFS) has long been perceived as a predominant solution for producing precise, variable frequency signals having very low distortion. The paper presents an epigrammatic and a comparative study of direct digital frequency synthesizers architectures. The direct digital frequency synthesizer presented are compared on the basis of two architectures namely, the read only memory (ROM) or look up table based architecture and the other co-ordinate rotation based digital computer that eliminates the usage of the large ROM based look up table. These architectures are compared in terms of the power utilization, SFDR, etc. A mixed signal ASIC designing approach is followed for the implementation approach.

Direct digital frequency synthesizer(DDS) is a new technology for frequency synthesis. This paper describers the implementation of a direct digital frequency employs a new architecture in 0.35µm CMOS technology. The first rotation implementer by using a CORDIC realized in pipeline and carry-save arithmetic. The directions of the CORDIC rotations are computed in parallel by using a little lookup table, for the first rotation. In order to reduce the circuit latency and increase the speed, the final rotation is multiplier-based, employing CMOS-DPL logic. The final circuit experiment results show the power dissipation as low as 1.44mW/MHz and the maximum clock frequency 200 MHZ1

Direct digital frequency synthesis (DDS) as an indispensable key technology for modern communication systems, is widely used in digital communications, satellite communications, aerospace and high-speed instrumentation. In practical applications, DDS technology is usually required to generate different kinds of communication signals. In view of the fact that there is no related research on spurious signals when DDS technology generates communication signals, this paper based on a DDS model that can generate arbitrary symbol rate communication signals, analyzes spurious signals of the structure in detail. The conclusions of this paper can be used for the spur evaluation and parameter selection in DDS engineering applications. At the same time, this paper provides a theoretical basis for the low spurious design of DDS, and has certain reference value for DDS to generate communication signals.

An experimental platform was developed to investigate the effects of audible sound (20 Hz to 20 MHz) on plant growth promotion, which included a microcontroller-based embedded system for audible sound adjustment and analysis. The direct digital frequency synthesis (DDFS) method was used to generate various waveforms of sound in the platform. Soundproof glass and mufflers were used to reduce background noise. The developed system was tested on various plants, including hydroponic tomatoes, celery and mung bean. The testing results showed that the developed platform could produce pure tone and mixing audible sound with high stability and accuracy, make octave analysis of the sound under experimental environments, and the background noise in the testing chamber of the platform was lower than 55 dB(A) when the compression engine was working. The developed experimental platform has a great potential on facilitating scientific research on acoustic biology effects on plants and collecting real-time experimental data. Keywords: plant growth, background noise, acoustic biology effect, direct digital frequency synthesis, sound sensor DOI: 10.3965/j.ijabe.20150805.1556 Citation: Cai W M, Zhu S M, Wang N, He H N, Ying B H. Design of an experimental platform to investigate the effects of audible sounds on plant growth. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2015; 8(5): 162－169.

This brief presents a fully integrated energy-efficient memory-based direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDFS). To overcome the limitation of using an accumulator and a Read-Only Memory (ROM) Lookup Table (LUT) within a DDFS, the proposed design utilizes a 6-bit memory with a configured mode of operation to synchronize the digital output clock with the input sampling clock. The proposed DDFS is able to tune the output phase and frequency once a phase rotator is used in the input clock path. To realize the proposed DDFS, a 6-bit memory in front-end and some analog blocks in back-end are employed. The prototype DDFS achieves jitter below 12.7ps <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{rms}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> integrated over a 100MHz bandwidth with 28.25Hz resolution while consuming less than 3mW at sampling clock 3.12GHz. The proposed DDFS is fabricated in a 0.9V TSMC 7nm CMOS process and occupies a core area of only 0.014mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .

In order to test the working state of adaptive optics system, it is necessary to design an online sweep-frequency circuit module to test the frequency response of the adaptive system. Sweep-frequency signal generator based on Direct Digital frequency Synthesis (DDS) is one of the core components. But the classic DDS technology also has some drawbacks: the truncation error of phase, the truncation error of magnitude (caused by memory FWL) and high occupancy of ROM. These are also the optimization directions in this paper. This paper presents a FPGA-based DDS sweep-frequency signal generator suitable in adaptive optics. It has a low occupancy rate with ROM. And in the case of low-ROM, the paper reduces the noise generated by the truncation error of phase and the truncation error of magnitude of DDS sweepfrequency signal generator by method of linear interpolation. The results show that, when the reference frequency is 100 MHz, the frequency resolution can be as low as 0.025 Hz. It only takes up 0.5 KB ROM with the ROM compression ratio of 64:1 in the optimized scheme in the paper and has higher precision due to the method of linear interpolation than the unoptimized scheme, which can meet the engineering needs. Compared with other schemes, the scheme in the paper improves signal accuracy in the case of reducing the truncation error of phase, the truncation error of magnitude and the occupancy rate with ROM, but only adds a multiplication and division circuit, which is a practical solution.

This paper presents an ultra-high-speed direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDS) microwave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) implemented in 1μm GaAs HBT technology. The DDS has the capabilities of direct frequency modulations with 8-bit frequency resolutions. Utilizing a Double-Edge-Trigger (DET) 8-stage pipeline accumulator with sine-weighted DAC based ROM-less architecture, this DDS MMIC can maximize the utilization ratio of GaAs HBT's high-speed potential. With an external clock output frequency of 5GHz, the DDS can output sine signal of up to 5GHz frequency giving an average Spurious Free Dynamic Range (SFDR) of 23.24dBc through the first Nyquist band. The DDS MMIC consumes 2.4W of DC power from a single -4.6V DC supply. Using 1651 GaAs HBT transistors, the total area of the DDS chip is 2.4 × 2.0mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .

Long Range(LoRa) Backscattering Communication (BC) not only has the advantages of low cost and low power consumption, but also has a long communication distance. However, the existing LoRa BC scheme is complex and can not be applied to actual engineering. For this purpose, a new LoRa BC method is proposed. A Direct Digital frequency Synthesis (DDS) technique is used to generate a square wave with a linear frequency variation as a LoRa scattering modulation signal. For the first time, the prototype of LoRa BC system based on MCU is demonstrated. Experimental results show that design can successfully realize backscatter communication at any position between the station and the receiver which are 208 meters apart, while being compatible with commodity LoRa chipset. In addition, the method is also applicable to an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) design, which enables the LoRa backscattering IC to have higher robustness, lower cost, and lower power consumption.

In this paper, we analyze the design and the possible optimization methods of the direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDFS) based on quadratic approximation. The goal is to design a DDFS with reduced hardware cost and very high spectral purity. For the DDFS based on quadratic approximation, there is a trade-off between the size of the memory and the approximation logic. We show that by exploring this trade-off, it is possible to design a DDFS which requires less hardware and features higher spectral purity than the previously presented solutions. By using the proposed design method, a DDFS that generates 16-bit sinusoidal waves with a spurious free dynamic range of 132 dBc (126 dBc if the phase is truncated) was designed.

This paper introduces a novel Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizer (DDFS) based on Complementary Dual-Phase Latch-Based digital design. Compared to conventional DDFS using Flip-Flop as synchronizing element, the proposed approach allows to double the sampling data rate while enhancing the clock skew tolerance and system latency. The design features a 24 bits pipelined Phase Accumulator (PA) and a 14×10 bits Phase to Amplitude Converter (PAC). The Phase to Amplitude Converter module is compressed using Quarter Wave Symmetry technique and is entirely made up of combinational logic inserted into 12 Complementary Dual-Phase Latch-Based pipeline stages. The logic is represented in the form of Sum of Product (SoP) terms obtained from a 14×10 bits sinusoidal Look-Up-Table. The proposed DDFS is designed and simulated based on TSMC 65nm CMOS standard-cell technology. A maximum data sampling rate of 6.8 GS/s and 0.022 W/ GS/s Power Efficiency (PE) is expected.

This work presents a low power direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDFS) by using a new two-level lookup table algorithm. The algorithm uses trigonometric double angle formula to divide ROM lookup table into two parts. The ROM size of the proposed architecture is 25% less than that of conventional two-level table. The hardware complexity of the new DDFS architecture compared to the traditional two-level table DDFS can be omitted one multiplier. A synthesized 0.35-mu DDFS with a SFDR of -80dB, runs up to 100MHz and consumes 81-mW at 3.0v. The power efficiency is 0.81-mW/MHz, which represents an enhancement of more than 38% compared to the conventional DDFS

A ROM-less direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDFS) is implemented based on a new 8th-order polynomial approximation of a cosine function, where digital square circuits are used to realize the components of the polynomial. MATLAB tools are used to simulate the performance of the DDFS system, where the spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) is employed as the performance factor. For a DDFS with a superior quality, the higher the SFDR, the better the spectrum purity. To validate the performance of the DDFS, the Altera FPGA platform is used with Quartus II and ModelSim, where simulation results based on Verilog implementation are illustrated.

In this paper, a quadrature direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDFS) based on a new angle rotation algorithm is presented. It is shown that the proposed architecture features higher spectral purity,, reduced hardware cost, power consumption, and tuning. latency when compared to previously presented designs. The introduced DDFS produces 16-bit sine and cosine waveforms with a spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) of 114 dBc. The design was implemented using a 0.35 /spl mu/m CMOS technology. It occupies an area of 0.46 mm/sup 2/ and dissipates 115 mW at 3.3 V supply voltage and 100 MHz clock.

This paper presents a direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDFS) for high speed application based on multichannel structure. This DDFS has phase resolution of 32 bits and magnitude resolution of 12 bits. In order to ensure the high speed and high resolution at the same time, the multi-channel sampling technique is used and a 12 bits linear DAC is implemented. The chip is fabricated in TSMC 130nm CMOS technology with active area of 0.89mm×0.98mm and total power consumption of 300mW at a single 1.2V supply voltage. The maximum operating speed is up to 2.0GHz at room temperature.

An 800 MSPS quadrature Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizer (DDFS) with an integrated 13-bit nonlinear DAC and a 200 MHz spur-rejection filter is presented. The system consists of a 10 ns latency ROM-less DDFS and a sine-weighted, current-steering DAC with a layout technique conducive to the DDFS algorithm. A 200 MHz active OTA-RC spur-rejection filter follows the DDFS-DAC giving > 60 dB rejection at 600 MHz with an IIP3 of 25 dBm. The system achieves an SFDR ≈ 33 dB and a total instantaneous hopping time of 15 ns. The system is designed and fabricated in a 0.13 μm CMOS technology, has a total chip area of 2.54 mm × 2.96 mm, and consumes 420 mW of power.