Very Wide Range Frequency Synthesizer Architecture for Avionic SDR Applications

This paper presents a very wide range frequency synthesizer architecture appropriate to avionic software defined radio (SDR) applications. The synthesizer generates a continuous carrier frequencies range between 187 MHz and 12 GHz that covers most of avionic communication applications. The covered range is distributed into twenty sub-bands by using a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO). The considered VCO is able to achieve a tuning range from 10 GHz to 12 GHz (18.2%) and from 7 GHz to 8.5 GHz (19.35%). It includes a capacitor bank, varactors, and switched inductors and is designed in 0.13 mu m CMOS technology. Using the advanced design system (ADS) simulation tool and SpectreRF simulator, the proposed VCO exhibits a phase noise of -125 dBc/Hz at 12 GHz and at a 10 MHz offset frequency with a power consumption of 4.1 mW. At 10 GHz, the simulated synthesizer phase noise is of -102 dBc/Hz at a 1 MHz frequency offset. In addition, the loop bandwidth of the phase locked loop (PLL) is 1.1 MHz whereas the settling time is 3.64 mu s.