A field programmable gate array based synchronization mechanism of analog and digital local oscillators in...

Area of Science:

• Electrical Engineering
• Signal Processing
• Digital Systems

Background:

• Bandwidth-interleaved data acquisition systems (BI-DAQS) require precise synchronization between analog and digital local oscillators (LOs).
• Random synchronization phase differences between LOs can degrade system performance across acquisition frames.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate an effective synchronization mechanism for analog and digital LOs in BI-DAQS.
• To analyze the random synchronization phase difference in BI-DAQS.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of synchronization phase differences between analog and digital LOs in BI-DAQS.
• Exploitation of the synchrony relation between the analog LO and the sampling clock.
• Implementation of synchronization in the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) domain.
• Development of a BI-DAQS platform with 5.5 GHz bandwidth and 20 Gs/s sampling rate.

Main Results:

• Successful synchronization between analog and digital LOs is achieved within each acquisition frame.
• The proposed mechanism is validated on a high-performance BI-DAQS platform.
• The synchronization method demonstrates efficacy with minimal FPGA resource utilization (flip-flops and look-up tables).

Conclusions:

• The developed FPGA-based synchronization mechanism effectively addresses LO synchronization challenges in BI-DAQS.
• The approach is hardware-efficient, requiring no additional external components.
• This work contributes to improved performance and reliability in high-speed data acquisition systems.