This started as a listing of books that were interesting and useful to me in PLL design. It has enlarged to include other tools that are useful.
I'm an unabashed book junkie. Here are some of the book's that I've found particularly useful over the years. They are in no particular order, so don't consider this a ranking.
PLL Specific Books
James Crawford; Advanced Phase-Lock Techniques. This is an advanced discussion on PLL's. There's a good treatment of sampling behavior in the loop, along with a substantial treatment of Fractional N PLL's. Perhaps the most unique, and useful part of the book is the CD-ROM, which includes Matlab code to create all of the plots in the book, something I look forward to using in my own design work.
Ch1-Phase Locked Systems, a High level Perspective Good overview of pll's used in frequency synthesizers, clock recovery circuits etc. unfortunate addition/use of damping factor and natural frequency. 2nd order filters have mostly been replaced by higher order loops in frequency synthesizers to improve spurious and noise response.
Ch2-Design Notes Chapter 2 is a useful compendium of equations and figures. It's in an odd location in the book, this is something that you'd typically see in an appendix, but the material is useful.
Ch3-Fundamental Limits Chapter 3 is an interesting discussion on the fundamental limit's in a PLL.. One interesting thing that I learned here is that a passive, non symmetric RF filter can cause AM/PM cross coupling. (Low pass and high pass filters are examples of non-symmetric filters)
He also makes a good point that if spurious side tones are not Symmetric, then the spurious must include amplitude noise as well as phase noise.
Overall, an interesting chapter. There is a section on using hilbert transforms to design loop filters, the Cramer-Rao bounds on frequency estimation as applied to clock recovery etc. Overall, an interesting review of useful information and theory.
Ch4-Noise in PLL Based Systems Very detailed treatment of noise, both in the time domain and the frequency domain. one of the appendices has a treatment of generating time domain noise with a specific power spectral density.
Floyd Gardner; Phaselock Techniques. This is perhaps the canonical book on Phase Locked Loops. The third edition adds some discussion of Sigma Delta Fractional-N PLL's, and a chapter on Digital PLL's. One thing lacking in this book, something that I've started looking for, is problems at the end of a chapter to test your understanding.
William Egan; Phase Lock Basics. This is one of the best introductory level books on PLL's that I've come across. Good general coverage of phase lock systems in general. There is now a 2nd edition available, which I haven't seen yet.
Roland Best: Phase Locked Loops: Design, Simulation, and Applications . This is also a decent book. I've got an older edition, I should probably get a newer version. This is nice in that is discussed software implementations of PLL's as well as charge pump PLL's.
William Egan; Frequency Synthesis by Phase Lock. Another excellent book, this one focuses on frequency synthesis, ignoring broader coverage of PLL's.
Dean Banerjee; PLL Performance, Simulation, and Design. This book is perhaps the best of all, in that it's free. This is an extended application note from National Semiconductor, and it's darn excellent. This has the best treatment of PLL Loop component calculation that I've seen published, and is detailed enough to write a nice linear analysis of a PLL. Link to National Semi Location
RF System Level Books
Qizheng Gu; RF System Design of Transceivers for Wireless Communications. Dr. Gu has written a nice transceiver overview, with a nice focus on CDMA/GSM transceiver design. Specifications are presented for CDMA/GSM, and different receiver/transmitter architectures are compared and contrasted. Specifically Direct Conversion, Low IF, Bandpass Sampling, and Superheterodyne receiver and transmitter designs are discussed.
The editing is a bit rough in place, but the content is excellent. Unfortunately, electronic copies of the spreadsheets and the Matlab code in the book are not available.
Ulrich Rohde; Communications Receivers: DSP, Software Radios, and Design. Decent book. I've got the First and Second Editions, but I haven't purchased the third edition yet. Both the First and Second Editions are decent, but long on expository text and short on equations.
William Egan; Practical RF System Design. Dr. Egan writes excellent RF books, and this is no exception. This is the only book I've come across that goes into detail on the spreadsheet analysis of Radio systems, and he provides electronic copies of the spreadsheets to use as a basis for your own work. I've written at least a half dozen receiver/transmitter spreadsheets, and I wish I had this book earlier. He treats changing VSWR at module interfaces, something I haven't seen treated in a unified fashion anywhere. The downside to this is that he's focused primarily on 50 ohm system interfaces. This works nicely for systems where the stages are power matched. This doesn't work so well for RFIC design, with the unmatched stages. Something to think about.
Software Tools
MS Excel. This is a very useful tool for most of the number crunching that I've been doing as an engineer. Its definitely limited in complex number support, but as a quick calculator, it's tough to argue with. Pretty much a standard for initial receiver system line up analysis.
Excel is getting replaced slowly, primarily because the more advanced modulation schemes used are making the single tone approximations used in excel analysis. The other complicating thing is the higher levels of integration. In an IC, the stages aren't going to be power matched for power consumption and area reasons. Because of this, cascading system gain, noise figure, and intercept points gets more complicated since the input and output impedances need to be accounted for. Accounting for this complicates the expressions significantly, making Excel more difficult to use.
Matlab. Matlab is an expensive mathematical simulation tool. It's a scripting language with lots of good mathematical library support. If you can describe it mathematically, you can simulate it with Matlab. On the other hand, it's pretty expensive, and there isn't a good way to link it to IC development tools. I spent a long time building a model of a sigma delta fractional N synth in Matlab/Simulink, and it worked pretty well. Certainly a good tool to know as an engineer.
SciLab. Scilab is a French open source design tool, similar in many ways to Matlab/Simulink. The price is attractive, but it doesn't seem to have the same support that Matlab does. Scilab Home Page
MathCad
ADISim. ADISimPLL is a custom version of SimPLL from Applied Radio Labs. While this version is customized to use only Analog Devices PLL ICs, it's pretty useful to calculate loop filter parameters and loop behavior. To get a copy, you need to register at ADI SimPLL Link . While the ADI version is specific to using ADI parts, the usage model is general enough that with a little thought, you should be able to model most PLL.
The HP 49g+ Calculator is also a useful tool, although it's largely been replaced by the Matlab/Excel for my day to day number crunching. The 49g+ has a much improved keyboard over the frozen hamster butt blue 49g, along with a SD card slot and a USB interface. The internal processor was changes to a 75 MHz ARM7, so there isn't a noticeable delay in calculations, something that was a problem with the HP 49.
Useful web sites
HPcalc. This is the single best site for HP Calculator users to visit.
EDAforum Decent Discussion board for Electronics, but be prepared for "Please do my homework" questions.
RF Globalnet Design Forums One of the older web discussion forums on RF Design.
Dr. Enrico Rubiola has a nice web page here that has some good details on Phase Noise. He comes at Phase Noise from a Physicist mindset, but has some useful information to share.
Lance Lascari has a nice web page here that has some very nice MathCAD PLL design worksheets. He goes into a lot of detail, and the work is fairly easy to follow since MathCAD is good at documentation.
Randall Evans had an article published in the January 2005 issue of QEX that described an Excel worksheet to do PLL design. The worksheet is locate here. The worksheet uses the complex number functionality in Excel to calculate the open and closed loop transfer functions in a PLL. It's not as easy to follow as the MathCAD worksheet that Lance Lascari put together, but Excel is a more universal program than MathCAD. More information on QEX is located at http://www.arrl.org/qex/ This work inspired me to go and put together the spreadsheet at PLL Design