FPGA-based high accuracy burst carrier frequency measurement method

A burst carrier frequency measurement scheme combined with a timestamping counting method based on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) is proposed. With the multiplication and phase shift of count clock, multiple parallel counters are continuously counted, and the times of the rising edge of the unknown frequency f_x are counted simultaneously. To obtain the frequency of f_x, linear regression by use of least-squares line fitting is used. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively reduce the error introduced by the quantisation error of ±1, improve measurement accuracy by about 2 to 3 bit, reduce measurement uncertainty by more than 20% and diminish the processing time to 200 ns compared with the traditional methods under the same conditions.