[time-nuts] PLL book 3rd edition

Richard (Rick) Karlquist richard at karlquist.com
Tue Mar 8 11:27:43 EST 2016



On 3/8/2016 3:18 AM, KA2WEU at aol.com wrote:
> Good Morning,
> technically you are correct, most buy what they find and live with a
> compromise. But companies like mine, R&S, test equipment , need superior
> performance and many parts which we need, we have made by foundries.
> Numerically controlled oscillators belong to this and modern IQ
> modulators and arbitrary wave form generators are the norm., much better
> then many analog  type designs.  Most chips on the market are
> compromises for power consumption and  phase noise. We now have fraction

I worked for HP/Agilent for 35 years, retiring 2 years ago just before
the Keysight spinoff.  Yes, they do have proprietary chips made by 
internal and external foundries (for example my phase detector).  Other 
than that one case, I was never able to get any custom
chips made during my career because of the high NRE cost and
the need to have either very high volume, or an extreme value
proposition to cover NRE.  There was a small group of designers
who designed a handful of fractional-N chips.  The rest of
us were merely users of them.  Newer designs have tended towards
COTS frac-N chips.  Similarly, there was a small department of
designers of NCO's, AWG's, etc (I was in the same lab with these
guys), and the rest of the engineers were merely users of these
IC's.

So in terms of the book market, it would be limited to a small
fraction of the engineers in test and measurement.  And that
small fraction probably has already gone way beyond any
technology that has made it into textbooks.  A lot of this
really advanced work is based on trade secrets that of
course will only appear in internal documents.

Rick


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