2011 Volume E94.C Issue 11 Pages 1802-1806
In this letter, an improved triple-tunable frequency synthesizer structure to achieve both high frequency resolution and fast switching speed without degradation of spurious signals (spurs) level performance is proposed. According to this structure, a high performance millimeter-wave frequency synthesizer with low spurious, low phase noise, and fast switching speed, is developed. This synthesizer driven by the direct digital synthesizer (DDS) AD9956 can adjust the output of a DDS and frequency division ratios of two variable frequency dividers (VFDs) to move the spurious components outside the loop bandwidth of the phase-locked loop (PLL). Moreover, the ADF4252 based microwave PLL can further suppress the phase noise. Experimental results from the implemented synthesizer show that remarkable performance improvements have been achieved.