[time-nuts] PLL book 3rd edition

KA2WEU at aol.com KA2WEU at aol.com
Tue Mar 8 14:06:01 EST 2016


Correct, unless yo want to sell PLL chips, DDS and  NCO's and their use 
needs to be explained  !  Ulrich 
 
 
In a message dated 3/8/2016 2:01:33 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
jimlux at earthlink.net writes:

On  3/8/16 8:27 AM, Richard (Rick) Karlquist wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>

Or is subject to  export controls because of the specific application. 
While you could  probably "generalize" it to get out from under export 
controls, that's a  lot of work.  Ulrich and Rick raise interesting points:

The people  who really know about this stuff do it for a living, all the 
time, and  probably don't have a lot of free time. I've done a couple of 
book  chapters, and it's an enormous amount of work, and that's with  
collaborators and editors to help.  I suspect that  for these  people the 
problem is not a lack of "funding" from the employer, but,  rather, that 
there is more work to do than people to do it.

And,  often, the "state of the art" is either proprietary or subject to 
other  controls on distribution.  Unless you are in a special situation  
(e.g. you own the company, or it's a small company and the owner(s)  
agree), I can see management not seeing the "value added proposition"  
for letting your talented, knowledgable PLL guru work on getting into a  
form suitable for publication: they'd rather you be making  boxes.




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