Dear Ken,
I have read your papers about how to predict phase noise of PLL, it's very helpful.
I have one question about the phase noise of ripple counter (programmable counter).
In programmable counter, we know there's a critical path(including the 1st DFF and End of Counting circuit, etc) which will determine the speed of the counter; for the same consideration, I think only the phase noise contribution of the critical path will affect the phase noise. That means phase noise from other stages of ripple counter is NOT accumulated.
So do you think I should only consider the contribution from critical path or all the stages?
thanks and happy thanksgiving day :)
rfic