[time-nuts] GPSDO Design

John Foege john.foege at gmail.com
Thu Jan 14 11:57:39 UTC 2010


Hi All,

Quick question for the more experienced members here with GPSDO
design/operation. Let's assume I'm using a 4096 phase comparator chip
followed by some kind of long time constant lowpass loop filter,
whether it be analog or digital, is not of concern for the following
question.

Obviously using a 74HCT4096 would mean that my EFC voltage range would
be approx. 0-5V. If I wanted to use an OCXO with say a 0-8V EFC
voltage range, then I would be inclined to simply use an op-amp
amplifier with a gain of 1.6 to scale the EFC voltage accordingly.

But not just any op-amp would do I take it? High-speed would of course
be of no concern. Also low-offset would be of little concern, as the
PLL would work to correct this, and it therefore seems to be
negligible. However, the part that's got me thinking is noise.
Obviously any noise at the ouput of the amp would adversely affect the
frequency stability of the OCXO.

I thought the best way to control this would be to use an extremely
low noise op-amp employing a rather large compensation cap to give me
a rather small bandwidth, perhaps only a few hundred hertz.

Anyone have experience with this? Assuming I have an OXCO with a max.
pulling range of 1ppm or 1e-6 over a 10V range, then I effectively can
pull 1e-7 per volt. This translates to 1e-10 per millivolt and 1e-13
per microvolt. Assuming that is a logical conclusion, then for a good
OCXO, in which I can at best hope for 5e-12 stability for tau=1s (e.g.
HP10811A), I would strive to to keep the noise at such a level that it
is an order of magnitude better than the best short term stability
figure. Accordingly, then I should shoot to keep any noise under 1
microvolt?

I don't have much experience with noise calculations. I know it is
specified in nV/sqrt(Hz) generally. Translating this to something
practical is basically the assistance I'm looking for here.

I would appreciate anyone being able to teach me a bit more about this.

Thank you in all in advance.

Sincerely,

John Foege




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