TUMA18: Impact of reference clock slew rate on RF synthesizer phase noise and improvement techniques

Abstract
Phase Locked Loops(PLLs), also known as RF synthesizers are used for generating high frequency outputs phase locked to low frequency references across various bands for example L to Ka band. Output phase noise performance of the RF synthesizer is crucial for various systems which includes RADAR, communication systems (BER), TX/RX chains, etc. For systems which need good in-band performance, dominant factors for the noise contribution is PLL, input reference noise and slew rate dependent reference path additive noise. Impact of the reference slew rate on the overall system and ways to improve the RF synthesizer output phase noise is presented.