A quadrature baseband approach to direct digital FM synthesis

The use of direct digital synthesis (DDS) to synthesize high-frequency analog signals has received much attention over the past decade. This technique allows modulation schemes such as FM and PM to be implemented with high fidelity using digital components. This paper investigates an improvement on the typical DDS approach of synthesizing the desired signal at an intermediate frequency. Instead, two quadrature baseband signals are generated, which are then mixed directly to the output center frequency. This method can be used to synthesize FM signals of arbitrarily high output frequency, using digital circuitry with considerably lower clock speeds.