Frequency stability measuring technique using digital signal processing

Abstract

AbstractTo measure the frequency stability of an atomic oscillator having high‐frequency stability, a technique using a pair of mixers and a time interval counter is widely used. This technique shares the signals of a local oscillator, uses a pair of mixers to convert the signals of the reference oscillator and the signals of the test oscillator to beat signals, and then uses a time interval counter to measure the phase difference between the beat signals. In this paper, the authors propose a frequency stability measuring technique that uses a two‐channel audio band digitizer in place of the time interval counter. This technique uses the local oscillator and pair of mixers to convert the test signals and reference signals to audio‐band beat signals, and then performs an analog‐to‐digital conversion on the beat signals. When the phase difference between two beat signals is numerically calculated, not only the effect of the local oscillator's phase noise can be eliminated, but the DC offset voltage generated from the mixers is not a critical problem for frequency stability measurements. The authors developed a prototype frequency stability analyzer based on this technique and obtained an Allan deviation (square root of the Allan variance) of σy(τ) = 5 × 10−17 at τ = 1000 seconds as a result of measuring its residual noise at a frequency of 100 MHz. This technique can be used to analyze a wide range of properties such as the clock quality of digital devices that operate at high speed, as well as the frequency stability of atomic oscillators at arbitrary nominal frequencies. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 87(1): 21–33, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.10097