Ultra-High Speed Direct Digital Synthesizer MMIC with High Dynamic Range for Arbitrary Waveform Generation

The recent success of ultra-high speed direct digital synthesizers (DDS) provides excellent solutions to waveform generation directly at radar bands. An arbitrary waveform generators operating at clock frequency close to 52 Gs/s with bandwidth greater than 26 GHz and dynamic range close to 80 dB would greatly improve transmitter performance for applications such as telemetry and multi-purpose RF sensors. Although the current DDS monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) have achieved amazingly high clock frequency, they all face the challenge of spectral purity. We propose to develop a high-performance DDS MMIC with innovative spur cancellation techniques using pre-distortion, spur lookup and Delta-Sigmamodulation for improved spectral performance and energy efficiency. This DDS MMIC utilizes interleaving technique to achieve ultra-high speed of 52 Gs/s. Interleaving channels clocked by inverted clocks intrinsically reduces the spurs due to the first order mixing.Our approach provides additional, novel techniques to cancel higher order spurs while maintaining favorable size and power characteristics.