Spur Analysis and Mitigation Techniques for Fractional Synthesizer

The process of fractional-N frequency synthesis inevitably results in periodic signals that manifest themselves as spurious frequency components in the output spectrum. Much research effort has been devoted to identifying spur production mechanisms and developing mitigation strategies. While great progress has been made in the case of charge-pump-based PLLs, digital-intensive architectures containing multiple soft and hard nonlinearities are throwing up new challenges. This talk will give an overview of spur production mechanisms, present recent mitigation innovations and explain why they work, and highlight open problems and potential solutions.