A Ka-band carrier generator using phase-locked loop (PLL) frequency synthesizer is presented in this paper. The design uses integer-N PLL chip PE83336 as the important hardware support. The key idea of generating Ka-band frequency signal with low-phase noise is to generate a high-quality X-band frequency signal using PLL frequency synthesizer and employ a frequency multiplier to deliver the high-frequency output at the desired frequency band. Experimental measurements of the frequency synthesizer demonstrate the excellent performance, which is achieved with the Ka-band output with a frequency resolution of 5.7 MHz and phase noise better than −70 dBc/Hz at 1 kHz.
