Implementation of different variants of table-based frequency synthesizers with quadrature output in VHDL

Abstract

This article describes the modelling and implementation of two different variants of direct frequency synthesizer, and evaluation of the performance of the finished design, in terms of memory and speed efficiency. The frequency synthesizer requirement comes from our complex radio transmission system design. The research activity has been focused on finding an optimal balance between simplicity, speed and memory consumption. The modelling was done in MATLAB environment in floating-point and fixed-point arithmetic, and the actual design was implemented and synthesized using the Xilinx ISE suite. The output has been connected to our customized radio front-end built on the Texas Instruments TRF2443 chip. The front-end output signal has been captured and compared with simulation results.