Radio telescopes are among the applications with the highest demands on a local oscillator (LO), which is used to receive and process the signals coming from the sky. Therefore the modules providing the required LO signal have traditionally been big and complicated. To overcome this disadvantage, we implement our own integrated frequency synthesizer inside a small LO module in this article. With this synthesizer we are able to achieve a jitter of only 50 fs integrated from 10 Hz to 2.5 GHz offset at a carrier frequency of 75 GHz. This is in part achieved by a very low in-band phase noise of −111.8 dBc at 10 kHz offset. The stabilizable frequency range is 62–88 GHz. Thus achieving promising results to fulfill this very demanding task with integrated frequency synthesizers in the future.

In this work, the design of the wideband millimeter-wave power amplifier for multiband communication is presented. In order to achieve compact, simple and robust design, a differential cascade transformer-coupled topology is used. The amplifier is implemented in 90 nm low-leakage CMOS technology and achieves 3 dB bandwidth of 8 GHz (from 60 to 68 GHz) and a peak gain of 18 dB. The PO1dB is better than 5 dBm from 58 to 80 GHz, and peak output power is 11.9 dBm with 1 dB flatness from 62 to 77 GHz. The chip consumes an area of 0.25 mm2 including bond pads and DC current of 125 mA from a 2.2 V supply.