TABLE OF CONTENTS Over the past few decades, there has been an incredible growth in the electronics industry. Electronic equipment from cell phones to personal computers now affects a great many aspects of our everyday lives. In order to make these devices ubiquitous, they must be low cost and compact. This increasingly makes integrated circuit (IC) technology the obvious choice for many of these products. As these products become more complex and more integrated, there is a greater need than ever to develop methods for designing frequency synthesizers in IC technologies, and that will be the focus of this book.
Frequency synthesis is, in general, concerned with the generation of periodic waveforms. This seems like a simple task, but it in fact takes up significant area and effort in many ICs. Generating good-quality periodic waveforms that meet many system requirements is not a trivial task. So, even though in system block diagrams the frequency synthesizer is typically only shown by one tiny box in the corner, the effort expended in designing this block should not be overlooked!
Many of the techniques used in frequency synthesis in this book actually predate the IC. Thus, in the past, there have been two classes of books: those that deal with IC-based circuit design and those that deal with frequency synthesis. In this book, the aim will be to combine these two topics and to discuss mainly the elements of frequency synthesis that are important for IC design. Likewise, the aim will...
