Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizer Architecture for Wireless Communication in 90 NM CMOS Technology

Abstract

Software radio is one promising field that can meet the demands for low cost, low power, and high speed electronic devices for wireless communication. At the heart of software radio is a programmable oscillator called a Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS). DDS has the capabilities of rapid frequency hopping by digital software control while operating at very high frequencies and having sub-hertz resolution. Nevertheless, the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and the read-only-memory (ROM) look-up table, building blocks of the DDS, prevent the DDS to be used in wireless communication because they introduce errors and noises to the DDS and their performances deteriorate at high speed. The DAC and ROM are replaced in this thesis by analog active filters that convert the square wave output of the phase accumulator directly into a sine wave. The proposed architecture operates with a reference clock of 9.09 GHz and can be fully-integrated in 90 nm CMOS technology