Direct Digital Frequency Synthesis implemented on a FPGA chip

Abstract

In applications where very precisely frequencies and fast switching speed are required the best solution consists in a DDFS circuit. This solution is very attractive in all digital systems because this architecture can provide fast tuning speed and coherent phase. In this paper a direct digital frequency synthesizer implemented on a FPGA (field programmable gate array) chip is presented. Comparatively with other component types (e.g. microprocessor), FPGA chips permit higher speeds for specific applications. The architecture used for DDFS circuit is a classic DDFS, described in the first paragraph of this paper, and short reports of the implementation are presented to underline the advantages of FPGA. This kind of circuit is easy to be implemented on a programmable gate array, and uses only a few resources of the device.