Digital Frequency Synthesis using Multi-Phase NCO for Dielectric Characterization of Materials on Xilinx Zynq FPGA
Precise measurement of dielectric characteristics of materials is becoming necessity in several engineering applications. The dielectric constant measurement over wide frequency range for emerging applications such as PCB manufacturing, agriculture, environmental and food processing industries has several challenges. With the advancement in digital VLSI and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based processing the digital techniques for estimating the dielectric constant are feasible. In this context the digital based frequency generation techniques over wide frequency are discussed in this paper. The multi phase Numerically Controlled Oscillator (NCO) based technique for generating high frequency signals are experimented in this paper. The efficient implementation of NCO for Xilinx Zynq family FPGA, XC7Z020 device is simulated here. The realized multi phase NCO is observed to be occupying only 15% of resources and operating at 250MHz to result efficient synthesis of sine wave with sampling frequency of 1GHz. The design issues related to digital carrier generation on FPGAs, while driving high frequency Digital to Analog Converters (DACs) are discussed and simulation results are presented here.
