A study of nonlinearities for a frequency-locked loop principle [frequency synthesizer application]

This paper presents the effect of nonlinearities on data converter resolution. Two models, an exponential and a sinusoidal approach, are proposed to estimate the drop in signal to noise (+distortion) ratio (SNDR). Matlab simulation results predict a loss between 1 dB and 10 dB when introducing a nonlinearity error of up to 2 LSB. These models were used to study the performance loss of a multi-bit converter when used in a frequency synthesizer architecture.