A Fully Integrated Monolithic Local Oscillator for LMDS Radio Link Applications

This paper presents the design of a Local Oscillator for a new Broadband Access System based on Point to MultiPoint microwave Radio Links. The key advance is achieving good enough phase noise performance (100 dBc/Hz@100KHz), over a relatively wide frequency band (15%), with good pulling figure and harmonics suppression, at a low cost and small size, for volume production. A fully monolithic VCO/Prescaler solution, integrating the resonator, the reflection amplifier, a single-stage buffer amplifier, a divider by eight and all main bias circuitry into a 5.16 mm2 GaAs chip has been developed. The development procedure set to make this possible, with specific emphasis to volume production issues, is hereby described. Some simulation and measured data are also reported. Moreover, some open issues and existing problems that still hinder first run design success are briefly discussed.