Electronic – pic32 maximum external frequency while running from internal 8MHz RC oscillator

Can you post more details regarding the target frequency, jitter and loop bandwidth (required settling time)? Also, what kind of oscillator do you want to use (external with a DAC, with/without dithering?, an on chip digital counter/accumulator)?

If you're happy with a digital "oscillator" (i.e. an overflowing accumulator) and its jitter then the rest of the circuit can be fairly simple:

• a counter (PFD) counting number of cycles between the reference and the (optionally divided) PLL output,
• a digital filter - anything will do assuming it does the integration (an accumulator) and it has a zero (minus (or plus?) a scaled PFD output) to stabilize the loop, optionally one or more poles above the loop bandwidth to reduce the control value "ripple" at reference frequency (only matters if fref
• most significant bits of the digital filter output (DVCO control value) are given as an input to the overflowing accumulator (DVCO).

As for the loop bandwidth, if not enforced by settling time, decide it based on the noise contributions of all components.

• If the jitter comes mainly from the reference or from PFD - use a smaller bandwidth,
• If the noise comes from the oscillator - increase it.

In case if the reference signal is phase or frequency modulated - use a loop bandwidth lower than the smallest frequency of the signal modulating the reference.

Trickier techniques are used if the output frequency is close or equal to clock frequency and/or if the low jitter or very fast locking range is required. Maybe in your case they are not needed, besides they may not be well suited to an FPGA implementation.

As others have said, accurate frequency and frequency stability are reasons to use a external ceramic resonator or crystal. A resonator is several times more accurate than the internal R-C oscillator and good enough for UART communication. A crystal is much more accurate, and necessary if you are doing some other types of communication like CAN, USB, or ethernet.

Another reason for a external crystal is choice of frequency. Crystals come in a wide range of frequencies whereas the internal oscillator is usually one frequency with maybe a choice of 4x PLL enabled. Some newer 24 bit core PICs have both a multiplier and divider in the clock chain so you can hit a wide choice of frequencies from the single internal oscillator frequency.

There are of course various applications that inherently require accurate frequency or timing other than communications. Time is the property in electronics that we can measure most accurately cheaply, so sometimes the problem is transformed into one of measuring time or producing pulses with accurate timing.

Then there are applications which require some long term synchronization with other blocks. A 1% oscillator would be off by over 14 minutes per day if used as the basis for a real time clock. Accurate long term time may also be needed without having to know real time. For example, suppose you want a bunch of low power devices to wake up once every hour to exchange data for a few seconds and then go back to sleep. A 50ppm crystal (very easy to get) will be off no more than 180ms in a hour. A 1% R-C oscillator could be off by 36 seconds though. That would add significant on-time and therefore power requirements to the devices that only needed to communicate for a couple of seconds every hour.