Temperature compensation of a crystal reference using direct digital

Abstract

Certain operational characteristics of a crystal (104) are measured during a testing and grading process. Once determined, information representing these operational characteristics are stored in memory (120) and utilized by a controller (122) to increment a phase increment register (114) upon determining the crystals ambient temperature via a temperature sensing circuit (124). The value stored in the phase increment register (114) is then sent to a phase accumulator (116) where successive phase increments are summed together. This summed value is in turn sent to a sine lookup table (118) where the instantaneous phase value is converted into sine amplitude. Finally, a digital to analog converter (126) converts the amplitude bit stream into an analog signal for use as a reference oscillator frequency having extremely high frequency resolution. The above mentioned process is repeated every clock cycle until a complete sine wave is produced at which point the phase accumulator is reset to zero and the process begins again.