[time-nuts] An (unknown?) nasty feature of the DDS principle fortime nuts applications

Ulrich Bangert df6jb at ulrich-bangert.de
Tue Jan 25 13:54:12 UTC 2011


Gentlemen,

I should perhaps add that I do not wanted to express that the observed flaws
are a problem of the DDS principle itself. My guess is that it is a effect
that is due to the movement of the sampling points in conjunction with the
different quantization error scenarios for every movement. I.e. it is a
problem of the practical implementation of a DDS not a problem of the
priciple.

Best regards
Ulrich Bangert 

> -----Ursprungliche Nachricht-----
> Von: time-nuts-bounces at febo.com 
> [mailto:time-nuts-bounces at febo.com] Im Auftrag von Ulrich Bangert
> Gesendet: Dienstag, 25. Januar 2011 14:38
> An: Time nuts
> Betreff: [time-nuts] An (unknown?) nasty feature of the DDS 
> principle fortime nuts applications
> 
> 
> Gentlemen,
> 
> the pros and cons of DDS chips and how to improve them have 
> been discussed here from time to time. Most of the 
> improvements have the aim to remove spurs out of the power 
> spectrum or to reduce the noise level. Yesterday I run into a 
> thing that may make it very qestionable whether DDS based 
> circuitry is in general good for precise timing applications.
> 
> I have setup a AD9850 which is clocked from my Z3805 
> reference. Since the clocking involves a sine-cmos conversion 
> (currently done with 74HC4046 as described by Shera et al) 
> and a second sine-cmos conversion (also 74HC4046) behind the 
> reconstruction lowpass of the DDS (DDS ouput serves as 
> reference input of an ADF4002 PLL) I wanted to check the AD 
> of the cmos output signal and later test whether there was 
> any improvement by using 74AC4046
> 
> The DDS was set to app. 1 MHz. For a 1 MHz output @ 10 MHz 
> clock with 4 byte accumulator width the necessary frequency 
> tuning word is 2^32/10. But since 2^32 is a power of two its 
> one and only prime factor is "2" and it is not divideable 
> without rest by any integer that is not a power of two 
> itself. 2^32 is 4,294,967,296 so the closest integer to 
> 2^32/10 is 429,496,730 which produces a frequency offset of 
> +0.000931322574615479 Hz against 1.0 MHz. 
> 
> I compared this signal with a 1,000,000.001 MHz signal coming 
> from my HP3325 which itself is also locked to the Z3805. I 
> used my SR620 in high resolution mode to compare the signals. 
> That is: The counter is armed by its own 1 kHz reference 
> signal and measures exactly 1000 start/stop time intervals 
> per second between its start/stop inputs which are fed from 
> the two 1 MHz sources. Then the counter averages over the 
> 1000 samples which improves the counter's noise by app. 
> SQRT(1000) = app. 32. which results in a close picosecond 
> resolution @ 1 Hz sample rate for the 1000 average.
> 
> The results of this measurement is shown in 
> 
> http://www.ulrich-bangert.de/Plot1.pdf
> 
> When the linear trend resulting from the small frequency 
> difference is removed the plot looks like
> 
> http://www.ulrich-bangert.de/Plot2.pdf
> 
> which shows an unexpected very regular pattern. Indeed a auto 
> correlation computation reveals that the measured signal is 
> highly self-correlated at even multiples of about 50 s or so 
> and highly anti-correlated at odd multiples of 50 s or so. 
> See yourself in
> 
> http://www.ulrich-bangert.de/Plot3.pdf
> 
> This regular pattern generates this nasty sigma-tau:
> 
> http://www.ulrich-bangert.de/Plot4.pdf
> 
> 
> The question is: Where does it come from????
> 
> Well, lets have a look into details: The accumulation process 
> starts with a value of zero. After 10 accumulations a new 
> period of the sythesized wave starts. However, the phase 
> accumulator does not start at zero again, because in 10 
> accumulations we accumulated 10 * 429,496,730 = 4,294,967,300 
> and the phase accumulator overflow happened at 4,294,967,296 
> - 1. The next wave period will have its "sampling point" even 
> a bit more far away from the overflow point and all the rest of it.
> 
> If this really were the reason for the regular pattern in the 
> measurement then we need to ask ourselves whether after a 
> certain time since start the DDS accumulator matches its 
> initial condition of zero after which the game begins new. 
> Since it was beyond  of my mathematical capabilities to 
> compute the number of accumulations after which this 
> condition is met again in an analytic way I wrote me a small 
> simulation of the DDS in PASCAL making use of the fact that 
> it supports 64 bit integers (INT64). 
> 
> This simulation indicated that the condition "accumulator = 
> 0" is met every 2147483648 accumulations. Expressed in time 
> (remember that with a 10 MHz clock every accumulation 
> resembles a 100 ns step in time) this happens every 
> 214.7483648 s. Well, that would explain why every 214 s or so 
> the wave pattern matches its initial conditions but not why 
> my measurements suggested a repetion rate of abt. 100 s. or so. 
> 
> It then came to my mind that perhaps not a perfect match of 
> the initial conditions is necessary. Perhaps we need only 
> come VERY CLOSE to the initial conditions. So I modified my 
> simulation in such a way that accumulator values would be 
> found which met the condition (acc>2^32-10) OR (acc<10). I.e. 
> I made me a small "window" around the overflow point and run 
> the simulation again. The result is to be seen in
> 
> http://www.ulrich-bangert.de/Screenshot.Jpg
> 
> 
> The first column is the number of accumulations, the second 
> column is the accumulator value and the third column ist the 
> time in s since start. Heureka! This clearly shows that the 
> synthesized wave (if not a complete
> match) is kind of "self similar" in a high degree every 107 s 
> or so in terms of the position of her sample points. This 
> matches my measurements very well. So we more or less need to 
> take it for granted that only the moving of the sample points 
> relative to the accumulator overflow point generates a 
> (allowedly very small) phase modulation on the output of the 
> DDS that I have documented with my measurents. For anything 
> else other than time nuts expectations this small phase 
> modulation may be insignificant or better than the specs demand.
> 
> However for very precise timing a DDS may simply be unsuited. 
> My hope that a combination of a DDS with a PLL would make a 
> practical offset generator for DMTD or so have vanished in 
> the hay. The desribed problem will not show up for power of 
> two values of the frequency tuning word but that leaves us 
> with very limited number of discrete frequencies that run 
> "Ok" on the DDS. This involves ALL circuits that feature a 
> DDS. Even the otherwise phantastic scheme suggested by Rick 
> Karlquist involves a DDS and may fail as a good offset 
> generator if it comes to timing aaplications. 
> 
> While I must confess that the effect came a bit surprisingly 
> with the DDS I have seen similar (if not the same) effects 
> when I tried to compare oscillators by downmixing them into 
> the audio domain and further process them with a sound card 
> and DSP software. One of the many things that I have tried 
> out was to use two digital PLLs locked to the two sound card 
> input channels. The sampled data came in chunks worth 1 s in time. 
> 
> Every second the program would compute how the PLL output 
> increased in terms of phase against the sampling clock and 
> then compute the difference between the two channels. Already 
> there I noticed that the phase not only increased in time but 
> also had this small periodical variations on top of it. This 
> was true when the sampled frequency was not an integer 
> multiple of 1 Hz. If the frequency was odd, say 100.25 Hz 
> then the observed phase modulation on the PLL phase had a 
> repetion rate of 4 s because every 4 s there was a match to 
> the initial conditions. I am sure today that this is due to 
> moving of the sample points against the sampled wave as is 
> the case the other way round with the synthesized wave of the DDS.
> 
> Best regards  
> 
> Ulrich Bangert
> www.ulrich-bangert.de
> Ortholzer Weg 1
> 27243 Gross Ippener 
> 
> 
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