Research on a Miniaturized Digital Servo System for Passive Hydrogen Masers

High-precision time and frequency references are essential for satellite navigation, deep-space exploration, and space science missions. To address the large size, high power consumption, and limited integration of conventional Passive Hydrogen Maser (PHM) servo electronics based on discrete analog chains, this paper proposes a miniaturized digital servo architecture for PHMs based on software-defined radio (SDR) and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The AD9364 is used as an integrated RF front end for microwave interrogation signal generation, receiver down-conversion, and analog-to-digital conversion (ADC), while digital demodulation, discriminator construction, and closed-loop control are implemented in the FPGA. A dual-frequency interrogation and time-division multiplexing scheme is introduced to separate the atomic and cavity responses, and an oversampling-based processing method combining outlier rejection and averaging decimation is adopted to improve the observation accuracy and noise immunity of weak error signals. Experimental results demonstrate stable closed-loop locking of the atomic transition spectrum, achieving a frequency stability of 1.46 × 10−12 at 1 s, while significantly improving the compactness and integration level of the servo electronics.