Battery Top Signal Generator

© Brooke Clarke 2006
Battery Top Signal Generator

Background
Description of the BTSG
ICS525 Description
Choosing an Input Frequency
Pushing the Limits
Related Products
Links
Ordering

Background

ICS (now merged into IDT) developed the 525 series of User Configurable Clock chips all available only in the fine pitch SOIC-28 Surface Mount Package.  This is a single chip that contains a PLL including prallel controlled dividers on the input, the VCO and the output.  Getting the factory demo board proved expensive and had very long lead time so I made my own but with different features.

Feb 2008 - Although this device will provide a signal suitable for say testing if a receiver is working, it's not going to do a good job if you want to use it for a crystal replacement in a radio.  That's because there is a lot of jitter and phase noise.  By choosing numbers so that the output divisor is maximized the jitter is reduced more than for other number sets, but still not good enough for radio crystal replacement.

Description of the BTSG

Features of the BTSG
Can be used to generate "even" frequencies from the color burst frequencies.  For example a 4 times color burst DIP oscillator at 14.31818 MHz will exactly provide 1, 5, or 10 Mhz.  And vice versa a 10 Mhz standard will generate 1, 2 or 4 times color burst exactly.

ICS 525 Description

The data sheet is a little sparse.

The output frequency is given by:
Fout = Fin * 2 * (V+8) / ((R+2) * S)
V, the 9 bit VCO divider, and R, the 7 bit Reference input divisor, are straight binary but S needs to be looked up in a table:

Divisor
Switch
Bits
1
110
2
001
3
111
4
011
5
100
6
000
7
101
8
010

A convenient way to get the divisor values is to use the ICS on line calculator but be sure to scroll down to the 525-02 results, don't use the -01 results.  In the first table under ICS525-02 note that VCO divider is the actual divisor, ref divider is the actual input divider and OD is the Output Divider.  VDW and RDW are the switch values which have been offset by 8 and 2 respectively.

In the next table there are typically 3 results diplayed Best Accuracy, Lowest Jitter and Lowest Idd.  Let's look at an example:
Vdd = 5 Volts
Input frequency = 16.6666 MHz
Output frequency = 80 MHz
Table 1 shows the actual VCO, Ref and Output divisors and I've added some more calculated data

error
ppm
VD
RD
OD
Fvco
Fo*OD
Ph Det
Fvco/VD
Best Accuracy 0
36 3 5 400
11.1111
Lowest Jitter 0
24 2 5 400
16.6666
Lowest Idd 0
12 5 1 80
6.6666
My guess is that:

Choosing an Input Frequency

Since the PLL works using integer divisors on the Reference input, VCO and output it's good if you can choose an input frequency that has factors that divide to get you to the phase detector.  For some common crystal and oscillator frequencies and their prime number factors see my Crystal Frequency web page.

Pushing the Limits

Max Fout 525 MHz

In the above example note that the first two choices have the VCO running at 400 MHz and the Output divisor at 5.  If the output divisor is changed to 1 (code 110) then the output is 400 Mhz. Maybe there's some problem with temperature?  This is higher than the data sheet Fmax value of 250 MHz.  The input frequency can be reduced with the 24-2-1 divisors down to 120 kHz with an output near 2.8 MHz, but very noisy.
When the input frequency is raised from 16.6666 to 20.766 Fout goes up to 500 MHz and there my spectrum analyzer quits.  Using a receiver I can detect signals up to 525 Mhz without any direct connection.

By choosing the input frequency to be as low as possible the VD value will be maximized thus minimizing the step between adjacent programmed outputs.

Min Fout 360 kHz

By setting the VCO divisor to it's min value and the Ref and Output divisors to their max values results in the lowest output frequency for whatever is the input.
Fout = Fin * 2 * (0+8) / (127+2) * 8) = Fin /64.5  This did not work.
But using OD=8, VD=18 and RD=5 causes Fout = Fin * 0.9 and works down to Fin = 400 kHz and Fo = 360 kHz.
Data sheet says phase detector freq 200 kHz min, but in the above case it's 80 kHz so they have some margin.

Related Products

Battery Top Power Supply -
tvb Divider - this divider will take in a 10.0 Mhz signal and output all the decades from 100 kHz down to 1,000 seconds per pulse.  The input can be any frequency from near DC to 20 Mhz.  So be using the BTSG to change a precision  10 MHz signal to something a little lower, like 4.4 MHz (which can be done with zero error) then the tvb divider will change that into a 440 Hz square wave of very high precision.

Links

TAPR Clock-Block - Phase Noise plots for the ICS525

Ordering

There are a couple if issues that needed to be worked out with the factory then these will be available on a trial basis.



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