Heterodyne methods and the superheterodyne receiver: In the lock-in amplifier, there is typically only one stage of mixing:

the input signal and the reference signal are mixed together, than one measures the time-averaged output. The mixing process shifts the signal of interest back down to DC, where it is measured. This is called homodyne detection. In many applications, especially at higher frequencies, one wants to amplify the signals more before mixing back down. There is additional advantage is a process known as heterodyne detection. This is most commonly applied in what is called a superheterodyne detection scheme. A superheterodyne process is one in which the input signal is mixed with a reference signal to produce a signal at some fixed frequency other than zero, which can then be filtered and processed. Most electrical signals have a significant component of 1/f noise; as a result, noise at very low frequencies is often much more pronounced than at higher frequencies. Consequently, there are significant advantages in staying away from zero frequency whenever possible. In the case of the superheterodyne amplifer, one also takes advantage of the fact that it is often fairly easy to build a very high-Q (narrow-bandpass) filter at a fixed frequency, but it is often difficult to tune these filters over a range of frequencies. In a superheterodyne process, one takes an input signal S(t) and mixes it with a reference signal, (often called a local oscillator, or LO), to produce sum and difference frequencies. The difference frequency is often called the intermediate frequency, or IF. The superheterodyne amplifier is important because there are very narrow-band IF filters available that will selectively pass the signals only at specific frequencies, so that after the IF filter the signal can be easily amplified; moreover, the amplifier only needs to work at one specific frequency. The very narrow-band IF filters are often made from quartz crystals of fixed dimension, and are often called crystal filters. Typical values of Q (f/f) are on the order of 30-50. In use, one tunes the frequency of the local oscillator until signal-LO=IF . Instead of adjusting the LO to the exact frequency of the signal of interest, it is tuned so that the difference in frequency between the signal and the LO equals the (fixed) frequency of the IF filter.

Heterodyne process, with IF filter shown

IF Filters are available in a range of frequencies, but there are a number of values that are very common for particular applications. 455 kHz is a very common IF frequency for use in AM radio receivers; 10.7 MHz is commonly used for FM radio receivers. The best filters are in the MHz range and are made using quartz crystals similar to those used in making quartz crystal clocks. These quartz crystals have very well-defined values of inductance and capacitance. In many cases, multiple crystals are used within one filter. One common topology is called a ladder filter. The one shown below would be a 4pole filter, and would behave like 4 cascaded bandpass filters.

The graph below shows data for a typical filter (taken from the Vectron web site):

Response characteristics of a typical IF crystal filter. Note the very low attenuation near the design frequency, and very high levels of attenuation outside the stop band. The superheterodyne idea is used in virtually all commercial radio receivers. In many cases, more than one IF is used, with several different LOs lowering the frequency and

filtering the signal in successive stages. Ultimately, the amplitude of the signal gets measured at some convenient frequency. The NMR Spectrometer as a Superheterodyne Radio Receiver: One very common example of scientific importance is the NMR spectrometer. In the NMR, the precissional frequencies of the spins are typically in the hundreds of MHz range. Below is shown an example of the situation used in a 400 MHz NMR (This diagram was taken from Tom Farrars book , Introduction to Pulse NMR Spectroscopy).

Here, there is a frequency synthesizer that generates a 356 MHz signal and another generator (not shown) that generates a 44 MHz signal. In order to excite the spins, the 356 MHz signal is mixed with a 44 MHz signal in the Gated XMTR Mixer to create a 400 MHz signal that is amplified by the power amplifier and used to excite the spins. Any fancy signal processing (i.e, 90-degree pulses, etc.) is done on the 44 MHz signal. After the 400 MHz signal is applied to the spins for the appropriate length of time, the

signal from the probe is recorded. The 400 MHz signal is first passed to the OBS MCVR Mixer , where it is mixed with with the 356 MHZ signal to create a 44 MHz signal. This is amplified in the IF amplifier, and then the rest of the spectrometer is similar to a dual-phase lock-in amplifier: there are two mixers (labeled PSD, for phasesensitive detectors), each of which is also receiving a 44 MHz signal, one at 0 degrees and one with a 90-degree phase shift. These are filtered and then measured with two analog-to-digital converters. Note that typical NMR signals differ from the original excitation frequency by 100 ppm or less (often 10 ppm for proton NMR). A shift of 100 ppm at 400 MHz corresponds to a frequency shift of 40 kHz. So, after the last stage of mixing, the signals that are being recorded by the A-D converters are on the order of 40 kHz or less. This is important, because it is very easy to get very high-resolution A-D converters (such as the sigma-delta converters we discussed earlier) that operate in this frequency range, whereas if we had tried to digitize the higher-frequency signals it would be much harder to do. Modern NMR Spectrometer: Here is a block diagram of a 2005-era NMR Spectrometer, the JEOL- ECA series (from JEOL web site at http://www.jeol.se/JEOL%20News/news28A/news28a/news28pdf/19.pdf In this case, you can again see that the waveform from the "PSY" selector is routed to the transmitter (the LO of the SSB mixer) and the first mixer of the detector (IRM). The output of the IRM passes through an intermediate filter , ann then splits into two channels that lead to two mixers; each mixer receives a LO signal from a direct digital synthesizer (DDS) that produces a digital waveform that is presented to two digital-to-analog converters (DACs); the two DACs produce identical waveforms, shifted in phase by 90 degrees to one another, so that the signal channels capture the in-phase and out-of-phase components of the signal.

Superheterodyning in high-frequency lock-in amplifiers. Here is a block diagram of a high-frequency lock-in amplifier, the Stanford Research Systems SR844. We already looked at a commercial low-frequency lock-in. The conventional lock-in is restrictged to frequencies of ~ 200 kHz and below by the frequency response of the mixers and, in a digital lock-in, by the speed of the A/D converters. To make a high-frequency lock-in, one common method is to use a set of mixers to take the high-frequency signals and reduce them to a fixed intermediate frequency. In the Stanford Research Systems SR844 lock-in, this is a 180 kHz. After mixing the input frequency down to 180 kHz, it is amplified and filtered. The SR844 does the last stage of demodulation digitally instead of having another set of mixers to reduce the frequency down to DC, it uses A/D converters that measure the in-phase and out-of-phase IF signals and multiplies them by a synthesized sine wave at the frequency of the IF.

Superheterodyning in AM radio receivers: In the AM radio receiver, we use an antenna to pick up the electromagnetic signals. This is usually coupled through a transformer to a radio-frequency amplifier. To tune to a particular radio station, one uses a local oscillator that is tuned to wstation+wIF. That is, to listed to a station at 660 kHz with a 450 kHz IF filter, you tune the local oscillator to 1110 kHz (=1.11 MHz) so that the when this is mixed with the AM signal, the difference frequency pass through the IF filter. So, now the AM signal is at a fixed frequency of approximately 450 kHz. To demodulate the signal and recover the amplitude information, you could use a simple diode detector (asynchronous demodulation) or use a phase-locked loop to generate a clean 455 kHz carrier, with a second mixer stage.