Here’s this week’s development updates for bFunc, the open source function generator I’m developing to sell. Each day’s entry represents an hour’s work - the hour before I start work on my real job every weekday morning.

If you’d like to buy a board to try, you can purchase one over on Gumroad!

The design doc for this project is available if you’re into design documents/philosophy.

All of my hardware and software source files are on GitHub. Check ‘em out!

May 3, 2020

May 1, 2020

  • Looking at some PGA chips
    • AD603 (expensive!!)
    • PGA113 (cheap!!)

April 30, 2020

  • Could we make do with any cheaper opamps in the system?
    • A little analysis suggests that Yes, indeed we could.
    • There are cheaper opamps for the diff to single ended stage - they just run at lower voltages.
    • Even adding two cheap LDOs just to step +/-12V down to +/-5V would be a huge improvement
    • TI’s LMH6642 would likely be a decent candidate https://www.ti.com/product/LMH6642
    • Similar performance over same frequency range
    • Less than half the price of the AD8065 (but also half the voltage range)
  • Also, since I haven’t slept much and I’m a little braindead - let’s test the oscillator!I
    • Soldered up one of the Horowitz El Cheapo special probes to the oscillator output.
    • I didn’t include testpoints to solder a probe on to, so I scraped back some soldermask and soldered to the trace between oscillator and DDS chip.
    • Lots of time spent testing whether I was connected to the right trace with a scope.
    • Long story short - during this test setup process, I found a bug! I didn’t tie the oscillator ground to the board ground. How dumb. Both these oversights will definitely be fixed in the next rev.
  • Learned some cool stuff about oscillators in the meantime.
    • For one thing: here’s why you want to give your test equipment a few minutes to warm up. The frequency trend is a straight upward slope for about 5 minutes after USB power is applied.
    • It doesn’t really settle into a predictable normal distribution for a few more minutes after that.
    • However, after about 10-15 minutes of being on, the oscillator stabilizes, and the frequency binning gets more uniform.

April 28, 2020

  • Alright! Next design starts… NOW.
  • I’m feeling pretty good about the firmware of my current design.
  • I’m not so comfortable with where the analog output stage is at.
    • No buffering.
    • No proper termination.
    • No antialiasing.
  • Three main areas I want to focus on:
    • Output Driver + DC Offset Control
    • Differential to single end converter
    • Antialiasing filter
  • Output Driver + DC Offset
    • This is a pretty straightforward inverting buffer based on AD8065 opamp
      • Unity gain stable
      • Wide bandwidth - GBP at about 150MHz
      • Rail-to-rail drive - can push/pull about 30mA
      • Not cheap - $3.71 in single quantities, $1.80 at 3k quantitiesI
      • Originally chose very high resistance values - 20k and higher
      • Simulations showed that this would limit bandwidth pretty substantially. A quick check of the AD8065 datasheet confirms
      • Dropping resistor values to 1k made a huge difference
      • Moved 3dB freq out from ~1MHz to ~35MHz
      • Added a little feedback cap to cut down on some peaking observed around 30MHz (Input is grounded in picture below because I was simulating a prior stage)
      • Output is, as it should have been from the start - 50 ohm series terminated

Image

  • DC Offset + Output
    • Frequency response is flat +/-0.25dB out to 25MHz
    • Cursor 1 shows the point at which it starts to deviate from 0.25dB flatness area (26MHz)Cursor 2 shows the -3dB frequency (38MHz)

Image

  • DC Offset Control
    • Inspired by a few TI app notes on unipolar-to-bipolar conversion circuits
      • http://www.ti.com/lit/an/sbaa343/sbaa343.pdf?ts=1588073331377
      • http://www.ti.com/lit/ug/slau525/slau525.pdf
      • http://www.ti.com/lit/ug/tidu974/tidu974.pdf
    • This circuit followed the design steps in that first TI app note, SBAA343
    • Plug in your DAC output range, and reference voltage, and your resistor values are just plug-and-chug.
    • AD8065 is probably not the right choice of opamp here - it’s wildly overspecified.
    • This stage is gonna be driven by a DAC output at pretty low frequency - 500kHz bandwidth or less.
    • Can likely get away with a cheaper opamp - I just haven’t done the work to find it yet.
    • Cap placeholder is there for the same reason as in the output buffer - it helps cut down on a bit of the ringing/transient overshoot in fast DC step transitions

Image

  • Antialiasing Filter
    • I’d really love to have a way to capture a scope waveform of my existing system with the AD9837, and then feed that waveform into LTSpice as a simulation input.
    • My cheapo Rigol scope doesn’t have the capability to do this - or if it does, I don’t know how to access it.
    • ADI doesn’t have the answer to that question, but what they do have is pretty cool - the ADIsim DDS webpage.
    • Allows you to select your DDS chip, your output signals, and whether or not you want an external antialiasing filter. VERY cool, and worth playing around with.
    • Below shows the output of a DDS chip running at 23MHz output, after being filtered with a 7th order inverse Chebyshev lowpass filter.

Image

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