After the recent discussion about Silicon Labs clock generators, I
looked at their Si5340A part and think it will be useful for a ham radio
project I'm working on. While it can do other things, for my use it
would use a 10 MHz input clock and generate 4 independent outputs in the
range of 100 kHz to 1028 MHz. Its jitter is <100fs, which translates to
"not bad" phase noise. Here's the data sheet if you're interested:
http://www.silabs.com/documents/public/data-sheets/Si5341-40-D-DataSheet.pdf
The challenge is that the chip is a 7x7 mm 44-QFN package and really
wants to be put on a six-layer circuit board. That's doable, but
challenging, for home assembly.
Rather than designing the chip into a larger circuit board, I'm thinking
of doing a small "carrier" board that would include just the chip and
critical bypass caps and have headers to plug into the main board.
Then, you could just drop the carrier into a project-specific board and
not have to worry about the complex layout and mounting. I have a
contract manufacturer who can build these up, if there's enough quantity
to justify the setup cost.
If you'd be interested acquiring in one or more of these, please drop me
a line off-list (jra at febo dot com). I don't think this will be a
TAPR project, but if there's enough interest to build 25 of these
carriers, I can probably make that happen. And remember -- this is just
the chip; you'll need to provide the rest of the circuit.
John
_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.
