A 900 MHz fractional-N synthesizer for UHF transceiver in 0.18μm CMOS technology

A 900 MHz fractional-N synthesizer is designed for the UHF transceiver. The VCO with a 4 bits capacitor bank covers 823–1061 MHz that implements 16(24)sub-bands. A 7/8 dual-modulus prescaler is implemented with a phase-switching circuit and high-speed flip–flops, which are composed of source coupled logic. The proposed synthesizer phase-locked loop is demonstrated with a 50 k Hz band width by a low 12.95 MHz reference clock, and offers a better phase noise and band width tradeoff. To reduce the out-band phase noise, a 4-levels 3-order single-loop sigma–delta modulator is applied. When its relative frequency resolution is settled to 10-6, the testing results show that the phase noises are –120.6 d Bc/Hz at 1 MHz and –95.0 d Bc/Hz at 100 k Hz. The chip is2.1 mm2 in UMC 0.18μm CMOS. The power is 36 m W at a 1.8 V supply.