eliminating a DDS

I have a design that will use a DDS synthesizer to generate an internal trigger rate for a pulse generator. The chip will be a ZYNQ

7020. The required upper frequency limit is maybe 20 MHz. The FPGA will have the usual, 48 bit or so, phase accumulator and sine lookup stuff clocked at maybe 100 MHz. The FPGA drives a fast DAC which in turn drives an LC lowpass filter and a comparator. Standard stuff.

But could such a clock be generated entirely inside the FPGA?

Just using the MSB of the DDS phase accumulator works, but it will have one full clock, 10 ns p-p, of jitter. That will be ugly at 20 MHz. I've got to look into some sort of outboard analog filtering to clean up that single-bit clock, but I'm not optimistic. DDS is just too weird.

Do you suppose that one of the FPGA PLLs be used to clean up the DDS clock, scrub the jitter somehow? That could maybe be used over a modest range, octave maybe, followed by some dividers.

Any other ideas for making a programmable-frequency clock with DDS sort of resolution, but without all that outboard analog stuff?

I've been playing with sorta DDS in LT Spice, using a quantizer to approximate the DDS accumulator and DAC, but that's obviously not the best tool for this.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin
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That isn't how FPGA PLLs work. They add jitter rather than removing it!

The jitter of a clock derived from within a FPGA would simply be related to the clock frequency used.

If you use a 250MHz clock, as per the max frequency of many cheap FPGAs, then jitter will be 4ns (+ a small bit).

What jitter spec are you looking for? What is the range of frequencies you require?

Would a VCO / PLL be a better bet to filter the digital jitter, using the MSB of your phase accumulator as the reference?

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Mike Perkins 
Video Solutions Ltd 
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Mike Perkins

We did one clock X2 multiply with a Xilinx DLL, 40 ==> 80 MHz, and the resulting clock period was bimodal, about 80 ps or so. Ugly. The actual jitter, ignoring the bimode, wasn't bad.

Picoseconds of period jitter would be nice!

Or maybe a filter and comparator? Instinct suggests that would be mediocre. The real advantage of outboard DDS-MSB clock cleanup is all those DAC pins saved; probably no cost advantage.

This was a longshot question, just to see if there was some clever trick lurking somewhere.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

you might be able to do something with the clock manager PLL, it does have a jitter filter mode but I haven't had any reason to look at how it works

other trickery you could do is

use an DDR output flop to get double resolution or more with a faster clock use some trickery with pll and serdes output

-Lasse

Reply to
lasselangwadtchristensen

*IIRC* you have to use the Xilinx clocking wizard (part of ISE or Vivado), and the SERDES blocks' multipliers have a jitter of 150-200ps.
Reply to
Tom Gardner

I sat in on a seminar on using FPGAs in comms circuits once, a long time ago. I made some comment that essentially boiled down to "trust the FPGA clock to not jitter", and was hooted down by the entire audience.

I haven't forgotten...

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Tim Wescott 
Control systems, embedded software and circuit design 
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Tim Wescott

Maybe you get a better jitter than the MSB by using an iodelay oscillator. Never done this, but xapp872 describes it.

Reply to
thaller832

Aren't you thinking of a digital PLL? The PLL in FPGAs is typically a standard analog PLL and so *would* remove jitter.

Yes, you are clearly thinking of a digital PLL based on the digital fabric of the FPGA. I assume John was talking about the dedicated PLLs found in most FPGAS.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

Most of my experience is with Xilinx who I don't believe use analogue PLLs.

Most FPGA PLLs are based on a variable length ring of gates which will have jitter as gates are switched in and out of the loop.

Can you provide an example of a truly analogue PLL in a mainstream FPGA?

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Mike Perkins 
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Mike Perkins

Changing from a Zynq 7020 to a '030 or '015 would give you transceivers (GTX or GTP, respectively). This allows you to position the output transitions with much more precision. This would reduce your purely digital DDS jitter from 10ns p-p down to less than 100ps p-p (for the '030 GTX in mid-speed grade) or 160ps p-p (for the '015 GTP in the fastest speed grade or ~270ps in the slowest speed grade).

IOW, the '015 gives you about a 40 times reduction in p-p jitter for about the same cost as the '020. Plus, the higher effective sampling rate changes the spectral characteristics of the jitter and you will find it easier to locate a clean band in which to position your output signal.

You might be tempted to use one of the onboard PLLs to clean this up, but they generate about that amount of jitter all by themselves, so there's probably not much net gain in doing that (along with some pitfalls).

The transceivers have another advantage - they have independent power supplies and PLLs so you won't have activity in the FPGA fabric causing output jitter as you do with normal logic outputs.

I'm sure you (or someone in your company) will know how to connect up a DDS to a transceiver to do this. Ask if you need hints.

Regards, Allan

Reply to
Allan Herriman

Is the analog signal from your sine generator used elsewhere in the system? If not, I don't see any advantage to using an external asynchronous analog comparator on an analog signal. You will pick up at least one clock cycle of jitter re-syncing the incoming analog signal to the digital clock. Then you have the jitter from the delays out to the DAC, the filter delays and the comparator jitter to add in.

If the digital logic for the timing generator is not in the same clock domain as the system receiving it, you will pick up at least one clock cycle of jitter in the clock boundary transition.

The only way I can think of to reduce the total jitter is the use as fast a clock as you can, and keep everything in one clock domain. Then you only have the clock source jitter that effects the entire system.

Good Luck, BobH

Reply to
BobH

Altera Cyclone V says this...

Phase-locked loops (PLLs) ? Precision clock synthesis, clock delay compensation, and zero delay buffering (ZDB) ? Integer mode and fractional mode

I don't think you can do zero delay buffering if the adjustment is digital. Later in the document they say this...

? Jitter attenuation

and

PLL-based clock recovery Superior jitter tolerance

That's pretty compelling.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

I had assumed that the pulse generator was outside the FPGA, and only the trigger rate was being generated inside the FPGA. It's not quite clear from the OP.

Allan

Reply to
Allan Herriman

I can't speak to what John is doing, but if he needs a variable-frequency pulse train with small jitter for some external purpose, then he needs some sort of DDS or PLL technique.

Assuming that the FPGA clock is good and steady, one could get a finer than one-clock resolution by playing tricks like using four or eight output pins to a current DAC, which then charges a cap, which then feeds a comparator. Then one wouldn't need to have a whole DDS inside -- but one would still need some external analog stuff, and one would still need to depend on the FPGA to have a nice consistent clock edge.

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Tim Wescott 
Wescott Design Services 
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Tim Wescott

used to use a DLL, I am quite sure Zynq has a real pll

formatting link

-Lasse

Reply to
lasselangwadtchristensen

When you say "whole DDS", it's not that much circuitry. Besides, John said he is using a 48 bit phase accumulator with a table lookup which will give terrible phase jitter. A table lookup is a very poor choice given the much better ways of high resolution phase to sine conversions possible.

I'm not at all familiar with how you would control the current DAC if you don't use a DDS. Are you suggesting the conversion of phase directly to analog to create a sawtooth wave with the DAC? I don't think you want to charge a cap. That would give a curved ramp sawtooth. Maybe I'm not following at all.

I don't know the Zynq parts, but nearly all other FPGAs have proper analog PLLs which will greatly reduce jitter. I believe the input frequency range is somewhat limited, so there may need to be some extra circuitry with the PLL to get the proper output frequency from the acceptable input frequencies.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

The Cyclone series I at least know a thing about. There's an internal octave VCO that you spin up to somewhere in to 600-1300 MHz range, and then divide down. When I've looked at jitter performance a bit it's fairly good; below the measurement floor of cheap measurement equipment. I haven't really gone in with a spectrum analyzer to look for spurs, but I'd imagine there's not much point to it. That probably depends heavily on case-by-case power supply bypassing and exact programmed frequency (as well as whether you're using an integer or fractional divide) and is hard to talk about in any kind of general sense.

The Zynq (at least according to the data sheet) does the same thing, VCO in the 800-2100 MHz range and divide down.

Xilinx says nuttin' about the loop filter bandwidth, but Altera gives typs for their three switchable filters as 0.3, 1.5, and 4 MHz.

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Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com
 
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Reply to
Rob Gaddi

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delay

Zynq datasheet say 1MHz and 4MHz

also says max input clock jitter 20% or 1ns

-Lasse

Reply to
lasselangwadtchristensen

You could use a single-bit DAC (like a Sigma-Delta DAC) filtered by a 1-pol e RC filter and then run back into an LVDS input. So then you'd just have the RC filter external. But I don't know if the oversampling rate (100MHz/

20MHz) is enough precision.

Another option is to use the lower bits of your phase accumulator to add ph ase to the output using the ODELAY blocks. You can get a precision of 78ps if you use 200MHz as your reference clock. However, I'm not certain how o ften you can update the ODELAY delay value.

Reply to
Kevin Neilson

Well, it's looking like I'll just use an external DDS chip, AD9835 probably, with the usual LC lowpass filter and comparator. I can clock that from a handy 50 MHz oscillator that we need for the Ethernet phy.

Looks like trying to do this inside the FPGA is too risky, jitter and such. That close to Nyquist, I will need a good filter.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
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John Larkin

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