Sabbir Osmany, a researcher at IHP, has presented a silicon-based 19 GHz frequency synthesizer at the IEEE Compound Semiconductor IC (CSIC) Symposium in Portland in October this year (PDF: 520 KB). This symposium is the leading international forum on developments in integrated circuits using compound semiconductors such as GaAs, InP, GaN and SiGe. The presented chip has been manufactured in IHP’s low-cost silicon-germanium BiCMOS technology named SGB25VD. The PLL-based synthesizer offers a phase noise below -110 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset over the tuning range of 17.5-19.2 GHz, which is the lowest phase noise among previously published silicon-based integrated synthesizers above 12 GHz. Possible applications include wireless communication in the 24 GHz band and satellite communication.