In modern radar and electronic warfare (EW) systems, active electronically-scanned array (AESA) antenna systems are often used with high speed multi-channel RF transceivers. These systems require very low noise clocking capable of precise channel-to-channel skew adjustment to achieve the optimal system performance like signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR), IMD3 and effective number of bits (ENOB). This reference design demonstrates LMX2820- and LMK04832-based low-noise JESD204B-compliant clocks and provide to multiple AFE7950s up to X-band operation and synchronized them < 10 ps with improved system performance at 9-GSPS/3-GSPS DAC/ADC clocks.
Features
- Multi-channel and scalable JESD204B-compliant clock
- Low-phase noise clocking for RF sampling AFEs
- Configurable phase synchronization to achieve low skew in multi-channel systems
- Low noise and low ripple DC/DC achieves equivalent performance to LDO with improved efficiency
- Demonstrates 8T8R synchronized RF sampling transceiver