Tuesday, August 1, 2017

DCO: comparator to reset period

I've been thinking about ways to enable frequency changes in the middle of a period without having to restart the period, which resets the phase.

My thought so far has been to use a comparator with a reference voltage set to slightly higher than the maximum amplitude of the wave, and reset the period once it triggers. That way we can reset the timer and set a new charge voltage anytime, and it will just slightly overshoot the desired amplitude. I would think that this could be a good solution, but it has some issues.

1) The amplitude may be temperature sensitive - if the capacitor charge time varies with temperature or if the charging current changes due to temperature effects on the resistor.

2) Setting such a reset point requires a trimpot and a way to check that the point is not set too low, in which case it would interfer with the normal operation of the DCO

As for 1), that is just something that has to be tested. But in case 2), it would be possible to let the microcontroller figure out the cutoff point by itself. If the MCU controls the reference voltage, it can loop through all frequencies (or at least a subset) and find the maximum amplitude during normal operation, then set the reference voltage to slightly higher than this. It would also be possible to rerun this operation later if temperature rises. The cutoff point may be found either using an analog pin, or it can be done using the comparator and gradually lowering the reference voltage until the comparator triggers.

The MCU has a built in comparator. It also has a built in DAC that can generate a reference voltage, but its resolution is only 5 bits. We need something better than that, but we do not want to add another spi controlled DAC or similar.

A possible solution: Use the built-in PWM generator in conjunction with a lowpass filter to generate a DC voltage.  This post, this article and this article has some filter suggestions.

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