Comparison of various numerically controlled oscillators

A numerically-controlled oscillator (NCO) based upon the COordinate Rotational DIgital Computer (CORDIC) algorithm offers less hardware than the direct form digital NCO at the expense of a second clock that may be as much as N/2 times the nyquist frequency of the system, where N is the number of bits in the NCO output. The CORDIC NCO also uses less hardware than the popular look-up table (LUT) based NCO. Both the LUT NCO and the CORDIC NCO require the additional clock, but the CORDIC clock is easier to synchronize than the LUT NCO clock.