Dissertation Titled

FREQUENCY SYNTHESIZER
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of
the Degree of

MASTER OF TECHNOLOGY
(Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering)
(2014-2015)

By

Akash .0. Sharma

(142150007)

Under the guidance of

Prof. Dr. Sarwade

Department of Electrical Engineering

ABSTRACT

Electronic signal source has gained much attention with the development of modem science
and technology. It requires wider frequency bandwidth, the frequency of high resolution and
a high degree of frequency stability, while produces complex waveforms, phase noise and
low spurious and can be programmed.
Nowadays frequency synthesis technique is the main technology to generate a large
number of high-precision frequency signal. The trend of development of synthesizer is the
higher frequency, stronger system functions, more advanced production process, higher
Integration , lower cost, lower power consumption.
Frequency synthesizer is an important component part of a communication system,
whose performance will directly affect the performance of equipment, especially on the
sensitivity and selectivity of the receiver. The PLL frequency synthesizing technology, which
develops fast recent years, has been the main design scheme of signal source, because of its
performance advantage .
Frequency synthesisers find many diverse applications within the electronics field.
Direct analogue synthesis is one of the oldest techniques, originally used in communications
and in apparatus such as laboratory signal generators. The availability of crystal-controlled
oscillators which allowed the output frequency of such synthesisers to be referenced to a
signal source whose frequency could be defined and controlled (for example within a
constant temperature environment) with some considerable accuracy was an important factor
in the development of such equipment.

INTRODUCTION

Phase Locked Loops are used in almost every communication system. Some of its
uses include recovering clock from digital data signals, performing frequency, phase
modulation and demodulation, recovering the carrier from satellite transmission sig-nals and
as a frequency synthesizer.
A frequency synthesizer is a circuit design that generate a new frequency from a single
stable reference frequency. Mostly a crystal oscillator is used for the reference frequency.
Most of the frequency synthesizer employ a Phase Locked Loops circuit, as this technique
has many advantages such as minimum complex architecture, low power consumption and a
maximum use of Large Scale Integration technology. There are many designs in
communication that require frequency synthesizer to generate a range of frequencies; such as
cordless telephones, mobile radios and other wireless products. For this reason most of the
communication designmake use of a PLL frequency synthesizer.
Phase locked loop is an approach as it covers many disciplines of electrical
engineering such as Communication Theory, Control Theory, Signal Analysis, Noise
Characterization, Design with transistors and op-Amps, Digital Circuit design and non-linear
circuit analysis.

Frequency Synthesizer:

A frequency synthesizer is an electronic system for generating any of a range

of frequencies from a single fixed timebase or oscillator. They are found in many modern
devices, including radio receivers, mobile telephones, radiotelephones, walkie-talkies, CB
radios, satellite receivers, GPS systems, etc.
A frequency synthesizer can combine frequency multiplication, frequency
division, and frequency mixing (the frequency mixing process generates sum and difference
frequencies) operations to produce the desired output signal.

The basic method of frequency Synthesizer

The following are the three kinds of frequency synthesizer method.

Direct Frequency Synthesizer ( DS ): As the first frequency synthesis, Direct Frequency

Synthesizer tuned the filter to the output frequency to form the desired frequency. This
approach requires a very high selectivity filters.

Indirect Frequency Synthesizer ( IS): Indirect Frequency Synthesizer is greatly reduced the
shortcomings of direct frequency synthesizer.

Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizer (DDS): DDS has Small size, low-powered and High
frequency resolution, it is able to transform the actual Frequency which is real-time, c
ontinuous phase.
The three methods above is the technical foundation of modern frequency
synthesis technology. Having their own characteristics in terms of performance, they can not
be replaced by each other but good complement. Based on performance requirements, we can
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combine application of these basic methods to obtain better performance of the frequency
synthesizer in practice.

The term "frequency synthesizer" is reserved exclusively for equipment generating

output frequencies which are completely dependent on a single frequency standard. The basic
elements used in frequency synthesizers are:

1. Frequency standard
2. Frequency dividers
3. Frequency multipliers
4. Frequency changers
5. Controlled oscillators

1. Frequency Standard
Precision quartz crystal controlled oscillators are presently available with frequency
stabilities of the order of one part in 109 per day. Higher stabilities are available with the use
of atomic and molecular resonance as a reference standard.
2. Frequency Dividers
Many varieties of circuits are available as frequency dividers, ranging from
relaxation oscillators such as Multivibrators and blocking oscillators, to capacitive step
charging circuits. Digital counters, regenerative modulation frequency dividers, and locked
oscillators may also be used as frequency dividers.The choice depends on the particular
system requirements such as upper frequency limit, required reliability, etc.

3.Frequency Multipliers

Non-linear tuned amplifiers have long been used as frequency multipliers. Later
techniques such as the "drift-cancelled oscillator", the "impulse-governed oscillator", and the
"automatic phase control" loop offer attractive advantages for high multiplication ratios.

4. Frequency Changers
Conventional frequency changers or mixers, coupled with appropriate filters, are
widely used to translate frequencies suitable for synthesizing the required output.

5. Controlled Oscillators
The impulse-governed oscillator, and the closely related automatic phase control
(a.p.c.) loop are examples of integral control mechanisms widely studied under the class of
servo-mechanism control systems. The most important feature of this class of controlled
oscillator is that the system requires no steady-state error of the controlled variable, but
instead utilizes an error in the integral of the controlled variable, i.e. an error in phase
difference.
6. System Design
The design of all frequency synthesizers is based on the combination of these
basic elements discussed above. Many combinations are possible, and the ultimate choice
depends on the specific requirements such as frequency range, frequency increments,
spurious output, jitter, ease of operation, size, weight, reliability and economic factors.

Key performance indicators of Frequency Synthesizer

The performance of the frequency synthesizer must be characterized by a series of
indicators. Here are some necessary:
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Frequency Range:
It requires that frequency synthesizer can work properly in the specified
frequency range and discrete frequency points we specified, while meeting other performance
indicators.

Frequency Resolution:
Frequency resolution refers to the interval between the two adjacent frequency
Points , which named frequency interval.

Frequency Switching Time:

Frequency switching time is the time that Frequency synthesizer's frequency
switching from one frequency to another till stable.

Frequency Accuracy and Stability:

Frequency accuracy refers to the drgrees that the actual output frequency deviation
from the standard frequency.Frequency stability is the changes in the size of theoutput
frequency at a certain interval.

Spectrum Purity:
There are two factors that affect the spectral purity:
phase noise and spurious.

Difficulty in Frequency Synthesis:

The most difficult problem in frequency synthesis is the suppression of spurious

signals and noise. The a.p.c. loop enables the designer to reduce these spurious levels to
values which cannot practically be achieved by conventional filter techniques. It also
simplifies the requirements of the basic elements which make up the synthesizer, and makes
possible the generation of frequencies in very small increments over a broad frequency range.
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Transistorization of frequency synthesizers for the high frequency band can be easily
achieved, with the usual resultant advantages of low power consumption, lightweight and
reliability.

Phase-locked Loop(PLL):

output signal

A phase-locked loop or phase lock loop (PLL) is a control that generates an

whose phase is related to the phase of an input signal.

The Basic Principles of Phase-locked Loop:

It is easy to initially visualize as an electronic circuit consisting of a variable

frequency oscillator and a phase detector. The oscillator generates a periodic signal. The
phase detector compares the phase of that signal with the phase of the input periodic signal
and adjusts the oscillator to keep the phases matched. Bringing the output signal back toward
the input signal for comparison is called a feedback loop since the output is 'fed back' toward
the input forming a loop.
Keeping the input and output phase in lock step also implies keeping the input and output
frequencies the same. Consequently, in addition to synchronizing signals, a phase-locked loop
can track an input frequency, or it can generate a frequency that is a multiple of the input
frequency. These properties are used for computer clock synchronization, demodulation,
and frequency synthesis.
Phase-locked loops are widely employed in radio, telecommunications, computers and
other electronic applications. They can be used to demodulate a signal, recover a signal from
a noisy communication channel, generate a stable frequency at multiples of an input
frequency (frequency synthesis), or distribute precisely timed clock pulses in digital logic
circuits such as microprocessors. Since a single integrated circuit can provide a complete
phase-locked-loop building block, the technique is widely used in modern electronic devices,
with output frequencies from a fraction of a hertz up to many gigahertz.
Frequency synthesisers can be categorised into three groups: analogue, digital or
mixed signal (hybrid). The majority of frequency synthesisers employed within the field of
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mobile communications employ a phase locked loop with a divide-by-N in the feedback loop.
This allows the channel to be switched conveniently by changing the value of the integer, N.

Frequency Synthesisers for mobile communications

The integer-N PLL (phase-locked loop ) is a commonly used building block of
frequency synthesizers as employed in mobile communications. It has the advantages of lowpower operation and low component count, compared to other synthesizer implementations.
The PLL-based synthesiser has by its nature a narrow bandwidth and the VCO phase noise in
this context is a critical design parameter. In order to keep phase noise Low. it is essential to
limit the conversion gain of the VCO, and to do this band switching is normally employed.

PLL-based Synthesisers

The use of PLLs in frequency synthesis is well-established. PLLs are flexible, but they
do have certain drawbacks; in particular they are limited in their ability to continuously
synthesise signals over a wide band of frequencies. The oscillator within the loop needs to be
band-switched in order to cover the frequencies associated, for example, with mobile
communications. Otherwise, a high conversion gain, Kv, is required, with a subsequent
increase of in-loop noise. However, the PLL itself cannot perform this task automatically, and
some extra circuitry is needed for this function.

1. Integer-N loops

The most commonly implemented PLL synthesiser is the integer-N PLL, as

represented by. The frequency of a reference signal from a crystal-controlled source is prescaled by frequency divider before being presented to one input to a phase detector. The
output of the phase detector is low pass filtered to remove unwanted signal components.
The filter's output is a DC voltage, which is used to control the frequency of a
voltage-controlled oscillator whose output is the desired synthesized signal. A second
frequency divider within the loop can be used to switch the output signal frequency from
channel to channel by changing the value of N, the frequency divider's input-to-output
frequency ratio.

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Example:

Suppose the reference signal is 100 kHz, and the divider can be preset to any value
between 1 and 100. The error signal produced by the comparator will only be zero when the
output of the divider is also 100 kHz. For this to be the case, the VCO must run at a
frequency which is 100 kHz x the divider count value. Thus it will produce an output of
100 kHz for a count of 1, 200 kHz for a count of 2, 1 MHz for a count of 10 and so on. Note
that only whole multiples of the reference frequency can be obtained with the simplest integer
N dividers. Fractional N dividers are readily available.
2. Fractional-N PLL

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Fractional-N synthesisers offer further control of output signal frequency by dithering

the inloopdivider's input-to-output frequency ratio value between N and N+1. Unavoidable in
this technique is the generation of spurious sidebands; these require elimination by extra
hardware,which pushes up the power consumption figure.

A Wide Band Synthesiser:

A wide-band hybrid frequency synthesiser has ability to generate signals over a wide
range of frequencies as compared to a PLL-based synthesizer is an important feature.
Another feature of the design is the ability to automatically band switch the VCO
without the need for extra circuitry. The essential elements of the synthesiser, based. It is
similar in structure to a PLL, but in this synthesiser design the phase detector is replaced by a
digital frequency discriminator. In general the reference frequency fref is not equal to the
feedback

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Advantage of Wide Band Synthesiser over PLL-based synthesiser:

1. The ability to generate signals over a wide range of frequencies as compared

PLL-based synthesiser is considered an important feature.

to

2. Another attraction of the design is the ability to directly band-switch the VCO without
the need for extra hardware.

Drawbacks:

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1. The bandwidth of the synthesiser is limited only by the data width of the digital circuit
block and associated DAC inputs.
2. The major issue to be addressed in the future is the elimination of unwanted low-frequency
components present at the output of the frequency discriminator.

OPTICAL FREQUENCY SYNTHESIZER

Frequency synthesisers are commonly used in the radio and microwave domain to
generate CW signals at very precise frequencies whose values can be randomly accessed by
digital tuning. An optical generator having a similar capability can find useful applications in
the optical domain. Recently developed tunable monolithic lasers provide the means to build
such an optical generator. These lasers generate a single frequency signal continuously
tunable by a single variable biasing current.
This synthesisers presents an optical frequency synthesiser, using such a laser, which
provides a large set of frequencies randomly accessible by digital tuning.

A fractional phase locked-loop frequency synthesiser using a

Motorola based microcontroller
A Motorola M58HClIEVB board is used in the design of a frequency
synthesiser using a fractional phase-locked loop technique which synthesises frequencies that
are integer plus fractional times higher than the reference frequency. The method uses a
68HCll microprocessor to generate very stable reference frequencies. A software program is
designed to give great flexibility in selecting the reference over a desired operating range of
frequencies. The ability to operate at low reference frequencies ( x 10 Hz) enables the system
to step in 1 Hz increments.

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In this an accumulator uses synchronous to the reference frequency. The

accumulator results is loaded into a DAC to correct errors generated in the feedback loop. In
this method, a stable reference frequency in the low range of frequencies is very important in
generating increment multiple and fractional synthesised frequencies. In the present work,the
Motorola M68HC11 microprocessor with a built-in 2 MHz real time clock is used to generate
the reference frequency in the different bands. This is accomplished by using the interrupt
capabilities of the built-in time comparators.
The flexibility of the programmed reference frequency makes this design
advantageous, in that, the processor provides the software design flexibility together with the
accumulator function in the microcontroller. In addition, the microcontroller is used to control
the front panel functions, such as frequency selection, from the keypad. There is also a LCD
display of the operating frequency and a number of error messages if improper entry is made
when selecting a frequency

Advantage:
1. In using this software approach the accumulator can be loaded at any desired number and
be quite flexible.
2. The 68HC11 processor can manipulate 16-bit timer operations so that better resolution can
be achieved.

Drawback:
However, a single 8-bit output port was used here which limited the dynamic range of the
DAC, and, in turn, the control capability of the system.

Open-loop modulation frequency synthesiser:

Design considerations of wireless systems such as ZigBee And Bluetooth,
are driving transceiver implementations towards very low cost and low power solutions with
efficient modulation schemes.
There are three popular modulation methods, within the phase-locked loop(PLL)
frequency synthesiser.

1. the quadrature modulation, since it is very flexible and well controlled However, it
increases the area and complexity of the circuit, leading to high power consumption.
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2. Another method is the direct modulation using a fractional-N frequency synthesiser,

whereby a S-D modulator controls the instantaneous frequency division modulus . This is a
promising technique, but suffers from the effects of PLL nonlinearity on spectral purity and
noise leakage .
3. Hence , An alternative scheme is the open-loop modulation, which presents low cost and
low power features.
It is fairly simple to implement, despite some drawbacks in terms of frequency deviation
which involves frequency calibration .

CONCLUSION

Frequency synthesizer is an important component part of a communication system,

whose performance will directly affect the performance of equipment, especially on the
sensitivity and selectivity of the receiver. The PLL frequency synthesizing technology, which
develops fast recent years, has been the main design scheme of signal source, because of it
provides the higher frequency, stronger system functions, more advanced production process,
higher Integration ,lower cost, lower power consumption.
A wideband Frequency synthesizer has ability to generate signals over a wide range of
frequencies as compared to PLL-based synthesiser. A microcontroller based Frequency
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synthesizer has better resolution. The integer-N PLL (phase-locked loop ) is a commonly
used building block of frequency synthesizers as employed in mobile communications ,but
needed extra hardware hence wideband Frequency synthesizer.
Nowadays, Analog Frequency synthesizer are avoided in communication system just
because of its temperature dependent. Open-loop modulation frequency synthesiser is which
presents low cost and low power features and fairly simple to implement. Thus ,every
Frequency synthesizer have advantages as well as disadvantages, depending on their
requirement , they have been implemented.

FUTURE SCOPE:
Frequency synthesizer requirements for future cellular radio systems i.e. on the
future third Generation (3G) requirements .Also very useful in cordless telephones,mobile
radios and other wireless products.It has enomorous scope in Tele communication.

REFERENCES:
1) A Design of Frequency Synthesizer Based on the PLL Method, HanLi,School of
Automation Engineering,Northeast Dianli University Jilin, p.r. China.
2) A Mixed Signal Frequency Synthesiser for Configurable,Communication Systems,P. Gray,
D.C. Hendry, R. Cambio, W.W.S. Ma,Department of Engineering University of Aberdeen,
Aberdeen AB24 3UE,UK
3) OPTICAL FREQUENCY SYNTHESISER ,D. M. MANDELBAUM,PO Box 645,
Eatontown, NJ 07724, USA
4) Design of a fractional phase locked-loop frequency synthesiser using a Motorola based
microcontroller,M.E. Rizkalla,H. Gundrum,H. Michel
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5)WIDEBAND FREQUENCY MODULATION OF FREQUENCY SYNTHESISERS ,M. J.

UNDERHILL P. A. JORDAN Philips Research Laboratories Redhill, Surrey RH1 SHA,
England
6) FAST DIGITAL FREQUENCY SYNTHESISER Laser Equipment Development Division
Nippon Electric Co., Ltd.,4-1-1 Miyazaki, Takatsu-ku,Kawasaki 213, Japan
7)phase lock loop Rizkalla,H, JORDAN Philips Research Laboratories Redhill.
8)frequency synthesiser with low power , Aberdeen Jouko,england
9) A Direct Digital Synthesizer with a Tunable Error Feedback Structure,Jouko Vankka
10)) A Transistorized Frequency Synthesizer G. HUSSON AND B. N. SHERMAN

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