ECE 371 Electronics Measurements and Testing

Assignment #1
Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS)
Submitted to Dr.

Emad Hegazi

Submitted by:
-Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Azhary Ahmed (Section 1)
-Omar Abd El-Nasser Fawzy (Section 2)

Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS)

What is the DDS?
Direct Digital Synthesizer is a powerful technique used to
generate radio frequency signals for use in many
applications from radio receivers to signals generators and
many more. This technique wasnt widely used until the
advances being made in integrated circuits technology which
allowed faster, more reliable and less power consumption
technologies.
Motivation and Advantages of DDS
A major advantage of the DDS is that its output frequency,
phase and amplitude can be precisely and rapidly
manipulated under complete digital control. Other inherent
DDS attributes has the ability to tune with extremely fine
frequency and phase resolution and to rapidly hop between
frequencies. These advantages have made the technology
popular in military applications such as military radars and
communication systems. Being power-hungry, of high cost
and has difficulties to implement it was almost exclusive to
military applications. Later after the advancements of
technologies of integrated circuits as mentioned before, it
became more available to be used. Its simple to add
modulation capabilities to the DDS.

 Theory of Operation:
In its simplest form, DDS is implemented using a precision
reference clock, and address counter, programmable read
only memory (PROM) and D/A converter (as shown in this figure)

-The Address Counter steps and accesses the memory

locations.
-The PROM is functioning as a look up table (LUT) as the
amplitude corresponds to the sine wave is stored in it.
-The D/A Converter generates output sinewave corresponds
to the digital input from the PROM.
[Reference A Technical Tutorial on Digital Signal Synthesis]

MATLAB Simulation:
MATLAB code:
clc;
clear all;
close all;
sinlut=1024;
SINTAB=sin(2*pi*(0:sinlut-1)./sinlut);
fs=1024;
Freq=1;
index=1;
step=(Freq/fs)*sinlut;
for i=1:1024
sin1Hz(i)=SINTAB(round(index));
index=index+step;
if index>sinlut
index=index-sinlut;
end
\end
plot(sin1Hz);
hold on;