A DDS based clock drift correction method of underwater electromagnetic
acquisition system
Abstract
The most important task of the seabed electromagnetic data acquisition
station is to discretize and sample the marine geophysical field signal
according to the set working parameters. The system controller of the
station generates the working sequence of data acquisition according to
the system clock. In addition, the system needs to record the underwater
real clock of the corresponding collected data for later data processing
and inversion. The system real-time clock is generated by the counting
and accumulation of second pulse (SP) signal, and the accuracy of SP
depends on the clock stability of system clock source, such as atomic
clock or crystal oscillator. The change of ambient temperature is the
main factor affecting the clock accuracy of the system. When the ambient
temperature changes, the output frequency of the clock source also
changes, which leads to the advance or delay of the counting overflow
point of the pulse counter relative to the standard clock. If the
temperature characteristic of the clock source is measured first, then
the overflow count of the pulse counter can be adjusted, the influence
of temperature change on the output frequency can be compensated, as a
result, the clock synchronization accuracy can be improved. However,
when the output frequency of the clock source is low, the method of
compensating the output frequency simply by changing the preset number
of the counter will produce large errors. In this case, it is necessary
to accurately adjust the output frequency and phase. Therefore, we use
direct digital synthesizer (DDS) to realize the above assumption. In
this process, the output frequency error curve of the clock source is
fitted according to the discrete data point measured in the temperature
characteristic experiment, then the curve is stored in the system memory
area in the form of look-up table. Micro controller (MCU) of the system
performs curve interpolation calculation according to real-time
temperature and generates frequency control word (FCW). DDS adjusts the
output frequency and phase of the clock source according to the FCW,
Finally, the corrected clock is output after processing such as
amplification and filtering.