An Automatic Clock-Induced-Spurs Detector Based on Energy Detection for Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizer

A clock-induced-spurs detector, composed of a programmable low-pass filter (LPF), energy detector and spur detection algorithm, is presented and applied to a four-channel 1 gigabit-samples-per-second (GSPS) direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDS). The proposed detector realizes the detection of spurs based on energy-detection, and the spur detection algorithm is adopted to automatically extract the amplitude and phase of clock-induced spurs, generated by the intermodulation of harmonic spurs and multiple clocks. Finally, the extracted features are sent to auxiliary DDS to decrease the target spur, following which the detector can be turned off to save power. Additionally, the detected characteristics under different output conditions can be read out through the interface for rapid frequency switching. The proposed detector integrated into a DDS is fabricated with a 65 nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process and has an area of 190 μm × 320 μm. The measured power consumption is roughly 38 mW, consuming 6% that of a single-channel DDS. The test results show that the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of this DDS can be successfully enhanced from −43.1 dBc to roughly −59.9 dBc without any off-chip instruments. This effectively proves that the detection accuracy of this detector can reach around −81 dBm.