COMMON INFORMATION

TB318
The NCO as a Stable, Accurate Synthesizer Rev.1.00
May 1998

Low Jitter Frequency Reference

In communication and other circuits, it is often necessary to clock rate. This is not cost effective for applications requiring
produce an accurate reference signal whose frequency and phase jitter of less than 5ns, however, since it requires a
phase can be precisely controlled in real time. The sample rate of 200 Mega Samples Per Second (MSPS),
Numerically Controlled Oscillator (NCO) is ideally suited for which drives the user to an ECL NCO.
this purpose. For some applications, the output reference
A much less costly circuit which solves this problem is
signal is a square wave, so the temptation is to use only the
shown in Figure 1. The output of the comparator is a square
MSB of the NCO output. This is useful in low frequency
wave with much less jitter than the NCO alone. The basic
applications such as motor controllers, but is inadequate for
idea is that the sampled sine wave output of the NCO is
most communications tasks. This is because the zero
converted to a smooth sine wave, which is converted back to
crossings of this signal can vary by one period of the input
a square wave with a comparator. In the circuit shown, the
clock from one pulse to the next, which creates an
comparator drives a filter, which attenuates the odd order
unacceptable amount of jitter in the output. For example, if
harmonics so that the final output of the circuit is a sine
the NCO is clocked at 30MHz, the jitter is 33ns. For a 1MHz
wave. The upper limit on the purity of the sine wave is also
square wave, this results in 12o of phase jitter. The
much better than that of the NCO, as will be seen below.
straightforward solution is to use an NCO with a much higher

FILTER
AMPLITUDE
AMPLITUDE

RESPONSE
HARMONICS

HARMONIC
AM

fC 2fC FREQ fC 2fC 3fC 4fC 5fC 6fC 7fC FREQ

fCLK
fCLK
AMPLITUDE

ALIAS
AMPLITUDE

FILTER
DAC RESPONSE
HARMONICS
ROLLOFF
AM

fC 2fC 3fC fCLK FREQ fC FREQ

fCLK

NCO D/A FILTER FILTER

FIGURE 1. MINIMUM SPUR CIRCUIT

TB318 Rev.1.00 Page 1 of 4

May 1998
 The NCO as a Stable,
Accurate Synthesizer

The primary sources of error in this circuit are: The circuit shown here is often used to generate the
In the NCO, spurs are classified as either AM or PM. PM reference tone for an indirect loop PLL synthesizer. In this
spurs are due to truncation of the phase in calculating the case, the output of this circuit is fed into one input of a mixer,
sine and cosine. If M = number of bits into the input of the with the other input of the mixer driven by a high frequency
Sine/Cosine Generator, the PM spur level is -6M + 5.17dB[1]. VCO. The output of the mixer is a high frequency tone. The
The AM spurs are due to amplitude quantization on the phase noise at the output of the mixer due to the noise in the
output of the NCO. If the number of NCO output bits is N, the reference circuit will be equal to the spur level of the
AM spur level is approximately equal to -6.02N - 1.76dB. [1] reference circuit plus 20*log10(output frequency/NCO
There will also be jitter due to the clock oscillator driving the frequency). For example, using the 45106 as a 5MHz
NCO, but since it is only the short term jitter, not the long reference for a 1GHz synthesizer, the spurs on the output of
term stability of the oscillator that contributes to phase noise, the reference would increase by 20log10(200), so the output
this will be negligible if a reasonably good oscillator is used. spur level would be -114 + 46 = -68dBc at 1GHz. The NCO
frequency resolution is 0.008Hz at 33 MSPS, so the tuning
The DAC introduces additional spurs which come from three resolution of the synthesizer is 200(0.008) = 1.6Hz. Finer
sources: Intermodulation spurs due to nonlinearities in the resolution can be obtained by cascading the Time
DAC; a spur at the clock oscillator frequency due to clock Accumulator with the Phase Accumulator. (See below).
feed-through; and power supply noise. The DAC also
faithfully reproduces the aliases and harmonics that are Extended Frequency Resolution
unavoidable products of the NCO due to the digital nature of
The phase accumulator of the HSP45106 (NCO16) is 32 bits
the output.
wide. This corresponds to a frequency resolution of (Sample
The bandpass filter on the output of the DAC eliminates the Frequency)/232. For a 25 MSPS sample rate, this results in
clock feedthrough, aliases due to the sampled nature of the an output frequency resolution of 0.006Hz. In certain
NCO output and most of the AM spurs. Spurs within the pass applications, there is a requirement for much greater
band are unchanged. The spectrum of the DAC output is a resolution. The NCO16 can address these applications
tone surrounded by spurs and noise in the frequency band using the Time Accumulator as an extension of the Phase
corresponding to the pass band of the filter with negligible Accumulator. Frequency resolutions of up to 64 bits can be
noise elsewhere. The area comprised of the tone, spurs and obtained in this configuration. Using the previous example of
noise is known as the pedestal. a 25MHz clock, the frequency resolution is 25MHz/264 =
1.35pHz. Using the parts in this configuration requires a
The input of the comparator is a relatively clean sine wave
small change to the external control logic: The Timer
which the comparator converts into a square wave. This
Accumulator Register must be loaded over the control bus
limiting action eliminates the AM spurs but has no effect on
interface. This mode of operation has no effect on any of the
the PM spurs. For this reason, the number of bits used on
other performance parameters, such as spurious free
the output of the NCO and the input of the DAC has little
dynamic range, phase resolution, etc.
measurable effect on the output. The primary contributions
to errors on the output of the comparator are the PM spurs To configure the HSP45106 for this application, the setup
on its input, which are passed through relatively unaffected, shown in Figure 2. Note that the Timer Accumulator output,
and power supply noise, which is attenuated by the power TICO, is connected to the Phase Accumulator input, PACI.
supply rejection of the comparator. If the filter on the input of To set the output frequency of the part, the Center
the comparator did not remove the aliases and clock feed Frequency Register and the Timer Accumulator must be
through, then the comparator will generate intermodulation loaded. Assuming that the Offset Register is not used, the
components. This makes a good filter and a careful equation for calculating the output frequency is now:
frequency plan essential.
Center Frequency = fCLK x (Center Frequency Register /232)
If the desired output of the circuit is a sine wave rather than a + (Timer Accumulator Register / 264 )
square wave, the output of the comparator is filtered to
In this equation, the contents of the value in the Center
extract the fundamental - that is, to suppress the odd order
Frequency Register is a two's complement number, meaning
harmonics of the square wave signal. Note that this signal is
that the part tunes from -(CLK Frequency) / 2 to +(CLK
much cleaner than the output of the first filter, since the
Frequency) / 2. The value in the Timer Accumulator is an
comparator has removed the AM spurs.
unsigned number. It is unsigned because it provides the
carry in to the Phase Accumulator, which is always added to
the LSB of the current phase value.

TB318 Rev.1.00 Page 2 of 4

May 1998
 The NCO as a Stable,
Accurate Synthesizer

Example
MICROPROCESSOR The circuit used to verify this equation is shown in Figure 2.
HSP45106
The clock oscillator frequency was measured at 25.24102MHz.
GND MOD0-2
VCC PMSEL SIN0-15 In order to achieve an output frequency of 1.000000Hz, the
DATA C0-15
WR COS0-15
center frequency was set to hexadecimal AA, the offset
WE
ADDRESS A0-2 frequency set to 0, and the Timer Accumulator set to
CS TICO
ENPOREG hexadecimal 28880000. A frequency counter was attached to
ENCFREG bit 15 of the cosine output. The actual frequency out varied
OES
VCC
OEC from 0.9999999 to 1.0000003 as the oscillator drifted with time.
DECODE ENOFREG
GND ENPHAC A more stable oscillator would yield more predictable results.
VCC ENTIGEG Note that going through the calculations results in an output
GND INHOFR
INITPAC frequency of 1.0000006Hz. The difference is due to the fact
PACI
START VCC INITTAC that the oscillator frequency measurement was only carried out
LOGIC VCC TEST to 7 digits, but the counter used in this example had 8 digits.
VCC PAR/SER
VCC BINFMT
CLK References
OSCILLATOR
For Intersil documents available on the internet, see web site
http://www.intersil.com.
FIGURE 2. EXTENDED FREQUENCY RESOLUTION CIRCUIT
Cercas, Francisco A. B., Tomlinson, M and Albuquerque, A. A.
The user should note that there is a flip flop between the Time Designing with Digital Frequency Synthesizers, Proceedings of
Accumulator carry out and the TICO pin, and another flip flop RF Expo East, 1990
between the PACI pin and the Phase Accumulator carry input.
This will cause a two clock cycle delay between the carry out of
the timer into the carry in of the accumulator. This will only
have an effect on the output when the frequency register is
updated; in effect, the Time Accumulator lags the Phase
Accumulator by two clock cycles. If this is a concern, this can
be compensated for by loading the input registers for both
accumulators, then toggling ENTIREG two clock cycles before
ENCFREG.

While the internal architecture of the HSP45116 NCOM and

the HSP45106 NCO16 are very similar, this application works
better with the NCO16 for two reasons. The first is that on the
NCO16, the timer is loaded using a unique pin, rather than
sharing this function with the ROM bypass line. This means
that the output of the NCO16 is always valid, instead of having
erroneous results on the output whenever the timer is updated.
The second is that with the NCO16, the data for the various
registers is downloaded into separate input registers, which
can be downloaded into the operating registers with the
ENXXREG pulses. With the NCOM, there is only one 32 bit
input register, which must be downloaded into the appropriate
operating register before the next value can be input into the
part. In this application, it means that the user can adjust the
phase between the register updates with the NCO16 but not
with the NCOM.

TB318 Rev.1.00 Page 3 of 4

May 1998
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