A time-to-digital converter based AFC for wideband frequency synthesizer

The automatic frequency calibration (AFC) technique is routinely used in the wideband frequency synthesizers which contain multiple voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) tuning curves. In this paper, a counter-based AFC design method is presented. The relationship between the AFC counting time and the VCO tuning curve characteristic is quantitatively analyzed. An AFC circuit which uses a time-to-digital converter (TDC) in the counting process is developed. Simulation results show that the proposed circuit significantly reduces the AFC calibration time while preserving the calibration accuracy. The simulated error-free AFC time of the proposed AFC is less than 3 µs.