High-Order Frequency-Locked Loops: A Critical Analysis

In very recent years, some attempts for designing high-order frequency-locked loops (FLLs) have been made. Nevertheless, the advantages and disadvantages of these structures, particularly in comparison with a standard FLL and high-order phase-locked loops (PLLs), are rather unclear. This lack of knowledge is attributable to the difficulty of small-signal modeling of these high-order FLLs, which has limited their analysis to numerical studies. Focusing on three-phase FLLs, the idea of designing high-order FLLs is first generalized in this letter. Then, a second-order FLL is considered as the case study, and its small-signal modeling, stability analysis, and parameter tuning are presented. Finally, to gain insight about advantages and disadvantages of high-order FLLs, a theoretical and experimental performance comparison between the designed second-order FLL and a standard FLL (first-order FLL) as well as a unification between FLLs and PLLs is presented.