Characterization Of Phase And Amplitude Quantization Effects In A Direct Digital Synthesis-Based Waveform Generator For Future Software-Defined Gps Payloads

This paper describes a software-defined GPS signal generator with a direct digital synthesis (DDS) architecture to examine the effects of quantization on a signal. We explore the power and cardinality of spurious frequency components due to phase and amplitude quantization on the generated signal. MATLAB (R) models are developed to match the hardware that is implemented in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) with a high speed digital-to-analog converter (DAC). Once the MATLAB model is validated against hardware, it is used to determine the optimal phase and amplitude resolution for given implementation.