High-frequency low-distortion signal generation algorithm with arbitrary waveform generator

This paper describes analysis and simulation verification of a high-frequency low-distortion signal generation method with an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG). Our previously proposed phase-switching method was limited to low-distortion but low-frequency signal generation, and therefore it cannot be used directly for high-frequency signal generation. We propose here a method for generating a low-distortion high-frequency signal with an AWG (i.e., the frequency close to the Nyquist frequency of the AWG), and show its theoretical analysis and simulation results. With this proposed method, 3rd order harmonics of the generated signal are suppressed simply by changing the AWG program (or waveform memory contents) - AWG nonlinearity identification is not required - and spurious components, generated far from the signal band, are relatively easy to remove using an analog filter.