A 17.5–22.5 GHz fractional — N wideband frequency synthesizer in 65 nm CMOS technology

This paper presents a 65 nm CMOS fractional — N frequency synthesizer operating at the 17.43–22.43 GHz range, suitable for E-band and unlicensed 60 GHz band applications. The VCO uses a varactor along with banks of capacitors to implement 16 overlapping bands giving the ability to cover both E-band systems. The overall system operates over a wide fractional bandwidth of 25%, achieving Phase Noise of −100.01 dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset. The fractional-N architecture guarantees channel spacing of 24.4 KHz with very low overall power consumption of 55mW.