An 800-MHz low-power direct digital frequency synthesizer with an on-chip D/a converter

An 800-MHz low-power direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDFS) with an on-chip digital-to-analog (D/A) converter is presented. The DDFS consists of a phase accumulator, two phase-to-sine converters, and a D/A converter. The high-speed operation of the DDFS is enabled by applying parallelism to the phase-to-sine converter and by including a D/A converter in a single chip. The on-chip D/A converter saves delay and power consumption due to interchip interconnections. The DDFS considerably reduces power consumption by using several low-power techniques. The pipelined parallel accumulator consumes only 22% power of a conventional pipelined accumulator with the same throughput. The quad line approximation (QLA) and the quantization and error ROM (QE-ROM) minimize the ROM to generate a sine wave. The QLA saves 4 bits of the sine amplitude by approximating the sine function with four lines. The QE-ROM quantizes the ROM data by magnitude and address and then it stores the quantized values and the quantization errors separately. The ROM size for a 9-bit sine output is only 368 bits. A DDFS chip is fabricated in a 0.35-μm CMOS process. It consumes only 174 mW at 800 MHz with 3.3 V. The chip core area is 1.47 mm². The spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) is 55 dBc.