Phase-Noise and Amplitude-Noise Measurement of DACs and DDSs
This article proposes a method for the measurement of Phase Noise (PN, or PM noise) and Amplitude Noise (AN, or AM noise) of Digital-to-Analog Converters (DAC) and Direct Digital Synthesizers (DDS) based on modulation-index amplification. The carrier is first reduced by a controlled amount (30-40 dB) by adding a reference signal of nearly equal amplitude and opposite in phase. Then, residual carrier and noise sidebands are amplified and sent to a conventional PN analyzer. The main virtues of our method are: (i) the noise specs of the PN analyzer are relaxed by a factor equal to the carrier suppression ratio; and, (ii) the capability to measure the AN using a PN analyzer, with no need for th…
Phase Noise and Frequency Stability of the Red-Pitaya Internal PLL
In field-programmable gate array platforms, the main clock is generally a low-cost quartz oscillator whose stability is of the order of $10^{-9}$ to $10^{-10}$ in the short term and $10^{-7}$ to $10^{-8}$ in the medium term, with the uncertainty of tens of ppm. Better stability is achieved by feeding an external reference into the internal phase-locked loop (PLL). We report the noise characterization of the internal PLL of Red-Pitaya platform, an open-source embedded system architected around the Zynq 7010 System on Chip, with analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters. Our experiments show that, providing an external 10-MHz reference, the PLL exhibits a residual frequency stability…
Noise characterization of analog to digital converters for amplitude and phase noise measurements
International audience; Improvements on electronic technology in recent years have allowed the application of digital techniques in phase noise metrology where low noise and high accuracy are required, yielding flexibility in systems implementation and setup. This results in measurement systems with extended capabilities, additional functionalities and ease of use. In most digital schemes the Analog to Digital Converters (ADCs) set the ultimate performance of the system, therefore the proper selection of this component is a critical issue. Currently, the information available in literature describes in depth the ADC features only at frequency offsets far from the carrier. However, the perfo…
Frequency Stability Measurement of Cryogenic Sapphire Oscillators with a Multichannel Tracking DDS and the Two-Sample Covariance
This article shows the first measurement of three 100 MHz signals exhibiting fluctuations from 2E-16 to parts in 1E-15 for integration time tau between 1 s and 1 day. Such stable signals are provided by three Cryogenic Sapphire Oscillators (CSOs) operating at about 10 GHz, also delivering the 100 MHz output via a dedicated synthesizer. The measurement is made possible by a 6-channel Tracking DDS (TDDS) and the two-sample covariance tool, used to estimate the Allan variance. The use of two TDDS channels per CSO enables high rejection of the instrument background noise. The covariance outperforms the Three-Cornered Hat (TCH) method in that the background converges to zero "out of the box," wi…