The recent boom in the mobile telecommunication market has trapped the interest of almost all electronic and communication companies worldwide. New applications arise every day, more and more countries are covered by digital cellular systems and the competition between the several providers has caused prices to drop rapidly. The creation of this essentially new market would not have been possible without the ap pearance of smalI, low-power, high-performant and certainly low-cost mobile termi nals. The evolution in microelectronics has played a dominant role in this by creating digital signal processing (DSP) chips with more and more computing power and com bining the discrete components of the RF front-end on a few ICs. This work is situated in this last area, i. e. the study of the full integration of the RF transceiver on a single die. Furthermore, in order to be compatible with the digital processing technology, a standard CMOS process without tuning, trimming or post-processing steps must be used. This should flatten the road towards the ultimate goal: the single chip mobile phone. The local oscillator (LO) frequency synthesizer poses some major problems for integration and is the subject of this work. The first, and also the largest, part of this text discusses the design of the Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO). The general phase noise theory of LC-oscillators is pre sented, and the concept of effective resistance and capacitance is introduced to char acterize and compare the performance of different LC-tanks.
The boom in the mobile telecommunication market has captured the interest of electronic and communication companies worldwide. In order to cut costs, and to decrease volume and power consumption, research is ongoing which focuses on the integration of a complete RF transceiver on a single die. This book discusses an important building block in such a single-chip wireless transceiver, that is, the frequency synthesizer. The text starts off with a comprehensive overview of possible synthesizer architectures together with a discussion of the general PLL theory. It goes on to present an easy calculation method of predicting LC-tuned VCO phase noise. Practical designs are presented which illustrate in detail the implementation of monolithic LC-tuned VCOs, using either bonding-wire inductors or hollow planar inductors. It is demonstrated that such designs can achieve the required phase noise specifications using standard CMOS technology. The book also discusses the other PLL building blocks such as the high-speed frequency divider.
The phase-switching multi-modulus prescaler architecture, which combines high input frequencies with a programmable division factor, is presented in chapter Six. A concluding chapter combines all the gathered knowledge and presents the first monolithic standard CMOS frequency synthesizer that achieves the DCS-1800 specifications.
