Development of a Miniaturized Frequency Standard Comparator Based on FPGA

Abstract

Frequency standard comparison measurement has important practical significance for the rational use of frequency standard in engineering. This paper was devoted to the study of frequency standard comparison measurement based on classical dual mixing time difference method. However, in the actual system design and implementation, the commonly used counter was discarded and the phase difference was measured by a digital signal processing method based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). A miniaturized 10 MHz frequency standard comparator with good noise floor was successfully developed. The size of the prototype circuit board is only about 292.1 cm2. The experimental results showed that the noise floor of the frequency standard comparator was typically better than 7.50 × 10-12/s, and its relative error of phase difference measurement was less than 1.70 × 10-5.