Category Archives: PLL

A Great Guide To Software PLLs

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There are some things that you think you know quite well because you learned them in your youth and you understand their principles of operation. Then along comes a link in your morning feed that reminds you of the limits of your knowledge, and you realize that there is a whole new level of understanding to be reached.

Take Phase Locked Loops (PLLs) for example. You learn how they work, you use them for frequency synthesis, and you know they can do other things like recover noisy clock lines and do FM demodulation. But then you read [Paul Lutus’] Understanding …read more

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In-Band Signaling: Dual-Tone Multifrequency Dialing

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One late night many decades ago, I chanced upon a technical description of the Touch-Tone system. The book I was reading had an explanation of how each key on a telephone sends a combination of two tones down the wire, and what’s more, it listed the seven audio frequencies needed for the standard 12-key dial pad. I gazed over at my Commodore 64, and inspiration hit — if I can use two of the C64’s three audio channels to generate the dual tones, I bet I can dial the phone! I sprang out of bed and started pecking out a …read more

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STM32 Analog Converter Phase Noise

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[Avian] has been using STM32 ARM processors to sample RF for a variety of applications. At first, he was receiving relatively wide TV signals. Recently, though, he’s started dealing with very narrow signals and he found that his samples had a lot of spread in the frequency domain that he didn’t expect.

What followed was some detective work that resulted in a determination that phase noise was the culprit. But why? [Avian] took some measurements and noticed that the phase noise almost exactly matched the phase noise specification for the STM32’s phase locked loop (PLL).

Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to …read more

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