To whom it may concerns,
Currently I am building a DIY frequency counter. Since this is my first serious
counter project I am trying to keep things simple, hence It Will Not Be State
Of The Art. Maybe a not-too-difficult hobby level counter will be of interest
to some, so I'd thought I'd post here...
The architecture in a couple of bulletpoints:
- fpga based as much as possible to keep the parts count down
- coarse counters running at max 200 MHz for now
- interpolation is done using TDC's. The TDC's look suspiciously much like
tapped delay lines and are implemented inside the fpga, using mainly the carry
chains.
- 10000 continuous time stamps per second
- 500 ps timestamp resolution. And with resolution I mean the smallest
resolvable thingy (related to bin size), not precision nor accuracy.
That 500 ps is conservative. I intend to do better than that, but just to give
some idea of the starting point... The main thing for now is to get a handle on
the DNL of the TDC.
I am currently playing around with some designs in a spartan-6 and a
spartan-3e. The spartan-6 design has more promise resolution wise, but it is
also not very hobby friendly (bga package). So if this is ever to be built
using hobby level soldering skills it will be spartan-3e. The 250k gates
devices are available in tqfp-100 package which is doable IMO.
The timestamps are transmitted over usb to the pc for number crunching. The
idea is to do some curve fitting to get a frequency estimate, computate Allan
Deviation, and do the obligatory plots. With regard to Allan Deviation, as long
as I make sure the measurements have zero dead time, I can compute Allan
Deviation using the raw time stamps, right?
Also note the glaring lack of a prescaler. This can and will be added at a
later date to extend the range of the counter. For now I just want to get the
basics working properly first. On the subject of prescalers, does anyone know
where to order Hittite parts in low quantities? I noticed on hittite.com you
can place an order but if I understand correctly that is only for 10+. Which is
probably great if you do a group buy, but not if I want to try out 3 of those,
2 of those, etc...
Another question for those that have already done this ... suppose you have a
"good" 10 MHz (OCXO, GPSDO, WhateverO) and want to use that for your reference
counter. What is a reasonable low cost method to end up with a 200 MHz clock in
a spartan-3e and a 500 MHz clock in a spartan-6? I am currently using the
fpga's internal dcm but the added jitter is considerable.
Since I am a newbie when it comes to this time stuff, no doubt there will be
plenty of you that have more experience with implementations of counters ... so
what are regular pitfalls I should be aware of?
Thank you for your time,
Fred
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