A low-noise frequency synthesizer for infrastructure applications

Because of higher performance requirements, infrastructure transceivers have historically employed lower levels of on-chip integration than their handset counterparts. One of the main limiting components preventing on-chip integration is the Local Oscillator (LO). The phase noise performance of the LO and its switching speed are some of the most critical performance metrics for an infrastructure transceiver. The work presented here is a frequency synthesizer IC targeted at wireless infrastructure applications. Previous works on high-performance VCO design either did not address the large tuning bandwidth requirements [1] or lacked the required phase noise performance [2–3].