Advanced Research in Electrical and Electronic Engineering
p-ISSN: 2349-5804; e-ISSN: 2349-5812 Volume 3, Issue 5, October-December, 2016, pp. 369-374
© Krishi Sanskriti Publications
http://www.krishisanskriti.org/Publication.html
A Method for Improving the Settling Time of
Phase-locked loop during Acquisition for
Communication Systems
Geetamoni Konwar
1
, Munmee Borah
2
and Tulshi Bezboruah
3
1,2,3
Department of Electronics & Communication Technology Gauhati University Guwahati, India
E-mail:
1
geetak222@gmail.com,
2
munmeeborah01@gmail.com,
3
zbt_gu@yahoo.co.in
Abstract—This paper describes a novel method for proportional-
integral-derivative controlled phase-locked loop model for
communication system for better settling time during acquisition. A
proportional-integral-derivative controlled block is inserted in place
of a 4
th
order loop filter of the phase-locked loop. The s-domain
transfer function of the system is derived for linear analysis. The
settling, phase margin, bandwidth and stability of the system are
analyzed through behavioral simulation by using MATLAB platform.
It is observed that the proportional-integral-derivative controlled
phase-locked loop model reduces the settling time (~ nS) in
comparison to phase-locked loop with 4
th
order loop filter in the loop
(~μS).
Keywords: Phase Margin, PID controller, PLL, Loop filter, settling
time.
1. INTRODUCTION
The history of the phase-locked loop (PLL) dates back to as
early as 1932 by Henri de Bellescize, when British researchers
developed an alternative to Edwin Armstrong's super
heterodyne receiver, the Homodyne or direct-conversion
receiver. In 1970, it became widespread because of the
development of integrated circuits (ICs) [1, 13, 14].
The PLL is a very interesting and useful building block
available as single integrated circuits in modern
communication system design. The PLL is a feedback control
system that generates an output signal having a frequency
which is synchronized to that of an input reference signal [2,
3, 13, 14]. As shown in Fig.1, PLL consists of the four blocks
namely: (a) phase detector (PD), (b) loop filter (LF), (c)
voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), and (d) a divide-by-N
counter. The PD is a type of multiplier whose output consists
of a dc voltage which has the phase information of the input
signal. The phase error between the input and output signal is
fed to the LF which integrates the signal to smoothen it. The
LF output is given to the VCO input. The VCO generates an
output signal with a frequency which is proportional to the
input voltage. The PLL is considered to be phase locked when
Fig. 1: Block diagram of PLL
the loop phase error is constant and the loop is in stable
equilibrium state [2, 14, 15].
PLL are widely employed in radio, computers,
telecommunications, satellite communication, airborne
navigational systems, frequency modulation and other
electronic applications. Frequency synthesis is currently a very
important PLL application area. The settling time of PLL
plays a significant role in applications which need fast
frequency switching as frequency hopping spread spectrum
(FHSS) communication system, step frequency radars (SFR)
and wireless local area networks (WLANs) [5,6,10,16]. Also,
frequency modulated (FM) transceiver application requires
carrier frequency and local oscillation frequency with low
settling time. Thus, it is necessary to improve the settling time
of PLL without effecting the noise performance and power
consumption of the system [10]. In this paper we discuss a
method to minimize the settling time of PLL system for
communication system.
2. REVIEW OF RELATED WORKS
In 2010, K. Kalita, J. Handique, T. Bezboruah and K. Bora
described a model for the analysis and software
implementation of proportional-integral-derivative (PID)
controlled higher order PLL to reduce the settling time up to
76.79%, 54.70% and 43.54% for 2
nd
, 3
rd
and 4
th
order PLL
respectively [7].