A new approach to the design of low power direct digital frequency synthesizers

This paper describes a new approach to the design of direct digital frequency synthesizers, based on the approximation of a sinusoid function with linear segments. The segments´ slopes are restricted to a reduced set of values lending themselves to an efficient hardware realization. A genetic algorithm search technique follows to optimize the selection of segment parameters in order to maximize the synthesizer´s spectral purity. Results obtained indicate significant reduction in complexity, compared to existing word for designs with similar performance.