Analog Devices’ AD9912 direct digital synthesizer (DDS) provides output signals up to 400 MHz while consuming less than 1000 mW.

This new level of performance is attainable using ADI’s proprietary “spur-reduction” channels to knock down the two largest harmonic spurs by up to 10 dB. This helps ease design efforts and enables engineers to spend less time frequency planning, especially in applications such as military receivers where every last dB is important to maintain critical system functions. The spur-reduction capability expands the benefits of DDS into designs where previous wideband SFDR performance was a limiting factor.

The AD9912 is a 1 GSPS DDS device featuring an integrated 14-bit digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and 3.6 microHertz tuning resolution on outputs up to 400 MHz. The chip also features a differential HSTL (high-speed transceiver logic) comparator for clock generation. With a system clock input, the AD9912 will also accept either a crystal or external clock. An on-chip low-noise PLL (phase-lock loop) reference clock multiplier allows reference clocks as low as 25 MHz. The AD9912 has auxiliary DDS channels that can be programmed to reduce the magnitude of problematic harmonic spurs in its output spectrum.

The AD9912 is sampling now and will be available in full production quantities in July 2007. The AD9912 costs $37.25 per unit in 1,000-unit quantities and is available in 64-lead LFCSP (lead-frame chip-scale package) packaging.