The theme of this blog post is not lots of tedious work, but refinement leading to good results.

First off, let’s talk about the funny I2C address on the parts which I received from Mouser. Since Digi-Key has no order minimums and very inexpensive shipping available (in the form of USPS First Class mail), I ordered another batch of Si5351As from them so I could see if they would respond to the correct address of 0x60. Sure enough, once I received them and used the Bus Pirate I2C address scan macro, they came up on address 0x60. So it seems obvious that Mouser has some oddball parts; perhaps they were custom parts that inadvertently escaped Silicon Labs. I’m still waiting to hear back from Mouser about the issue, but in the meantime, I would recommend you order from a different distributor until they fix this problem.

I also decided last Friday to try to get my KiCad skills back in order and crank out a cheap and cheerful breakout board for the Si5351A. It didn’t take me too long to get back in the groove and design a small, simple PCB that would make it easier to prototype with the Si5351A. The board is 30 mm x 50 mm, with three end launch SMA connectors on the right edge and the power/I2C pins on the other side. I’ve also added wideband transformers (Mini-Circuits TC1-6X+) to the outputs to isolate them from the breakout board. Below you can see the OSHPark rendering of the board.

They will hopefully be here in about a week or so (one of the benefits of living in the same city as OSHPark). Assuming that they work as expected, there’s a chance that I may end up selling these as kits, so stay tuned if that interests you.

Now on to the best news. The last big question in my Si5351 investigations is whether it would be suitable for VFO usage in a standard amateur radio receiver, where it would have to be tuned rapidly. Having seen in a Silicon Labs application note that the Si5351 can be tuned glitch-free by locking the PLL to a fixed frequency and only changing the synth parameters of the attached multisynth, I set out to implement that in the Si5351 avr-gcc library.

Next, I ripped the AD9834 DDS and crystal BFO oscillator out of my last CC1 prototype and substituted the Si5351 for the VFO and BFO. Long story short, after a bit of tweaking, the part performed beautifully! I can crank the tuning encoder knob as fast as I possibly can, and I get no hint of any glitching or other tuning artifacts. The Si5351 has enough oomph to drive the BF998 dual-gate MOSFETs as well. Into a high-impedance, the drive level was over 4 Vpp, which is a decent drive level for that mixer. The only slight hardware change I had to make was to change the I2C pull-up resistors to 10kΩ and reduce the I2C clock speed down to about 100 kHz in order to reduce noise from the I2C line getting into the receiver. This change seemed to have no adverse affect on the tuning speed of the Si5351.

At this point, I believe I have investigated most of the main points that I wanted to look at when this first began. Wonderfully, the Si5351 appears to be a very suitable IC for use in all kinds of amateur radio applications. The multiple independent outputs is a superb feature, and has the potential to greatly reduce parts count and price in ham radio transceivers. I’m already thinking of many applications where this inexpensive, stable, and versatile IC can be used.

Even though the main objectives have been met, I’m still not done with this IC. I would like to look into further details, such as phase noise. I also have a lot of plans, such as building a new radio from scratch using the Si5351, possibly selling the breakout board mentioned above as a kit, and maybe even creating a more complete development board (which could be used as a wide-range VFO) by incorporating a microcontroller, LCD display, and encoder knob. Keep watching the blog for further updates.