Digitally controlled oscillator

A digitally controlled oscillator or DCO is used in synthesizers, microcontrollers, and software-defined radios. The name is analogous with "voltage-controlled oscillator." DCOs were designed to overcome the tuning stability limitations of early VCO designs. Confusion over terminology The term "digitally controlled oscillator" has been used to describe the combination of a voltage-controlled oscillator driven by a control signal from a digital-to-analog converter, and is also sometimes used to describe numerically controlled oscillators. This article refers specifically to the DCOs used in many synthesizers of the 1980s . These include the Roland Juno-6, Juno-60, Juno-106, JX-3P, JX-8P, and JX-10, the Elka Synthex, the Korg Poly-61, the Oberheim Matrix-6, some instruments by Akai and Kawai, and the recent Prophet '08 and its successor Rev2 by Dave Smith Instruments. Relation to earlier VCO designs