A new approach to the design of low power direct digital frequency synthesizers

This paper describes a new approach to the design of direct digital frequency synthesizers, based on the approximation of a sinusoid function with linear segments. The segments' slopes are restricted to a reduced set of values lending themselves to an efficient hardware realization. A genetic algorithm search technique follows to optimize the selection of segment parameters in order to maximize the synthesizer's spectral purity. Results obtained indicate significant reduction in complexity, compared to existing word for designs with similar performance.