New Technique of Frequency Generation for Avionic Equipment

The growing requirement for general aviation avionic equipment with hundreds of channels has generated a new breed of frequency synthesizers. Presently, most avionic equipments employ banks of crystals and bulky electromechanical and mechanical components to provide the necessary receiver and transmitter frequencies. By means of digital techniques and voltage-controlled oscillators, a frequency synthesizer can provide an infinite number of frequencies with crystal stability using a single crystal for reference.

The use of monolithic integrated circuits provides a means of miniaturizing the complex circuitry required in the digital synthesizer to reduce it to a practical size for avionic equipment.