A mixed signal wide-band BiCMOS frequency synthesizer for DVB application

This paper presents a BiCMOS frequency synthesizer covering frequency range from 500 MHz to 2175 MHz which is fully compatible with DVB-S application. The frequency synthesizer consists of monolithic VCOs, utilizing on-chip symmetric inductor, high speed CML divider built with high performance BJT, and can achieve -80 dBc/Hz, -100 dBc/Hz, -123 dBc/Hz phase noise at 1 KHz, 100 KHz and 1 MHz carrier frequency offset, respectively. The 4 VCOs, which can be tuned from 2 GHz to 4.3 GHz with 20 % tuning range each and a maxim KVCO of 200 MHz/V, is divided by two or four to synthesis the desired DVB-S L-band (0.95-2.15 GHz) or other UHF-band frequency. Measure results show that this design works well over a temperature variation from 0degC to 85degC. The design is implemented with a 0.35 mum SiGe BiCMOS technology.