Research and Implementation of a Numerical Control Oscillator with Improved Pipelined CORDIC Algorithm

Abstract

As the recognized core of electronic systems, frequency synthesizers have been applied in many communication fields. NC oscillator (NCO) is the main component of the frequency synthesizer. It helps to generate high-precision and high-frequency signals, so it has been widely used. NCO implementation methods include table lookup method, polynomial expansion method, coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) algorithm, etc. CORDIC algorithm is one of many commonly used methods in trigonometric function calculation and digital signal processing, and is often used as the core of DDS (direct digital synthesis) to generate signals. Compared with table lookup and polynomial expansion, CORDIC algorithm has higher efficiency in signal generation and hardware utilization. In view of the disadvantages of traditional CORDIC algorithm, which takes up large resources and has relatively slow calculation speed, in order to improve the output efficiency, this paper uses an efficient 12-stage pipelined CORDIC architecture and a very small lookup table (LUT) to implement a sine wave generator. The system is coded and simulated in Quartus and ModelSim. The results show that the proposed structure can increase the operating speed of the system from 217.77 MHz to 291.04 MHz, and improve the output efficiency of the system.