Kaben Wireless Silicon Inc., a wireless semiconductor design company, announced that it has successfully produced a WiMAX Fractional-N synthesizer in IBM 7WL process.

The Fractional-N synthesizer delivers a -116 dBc/Hz phase noise performance and -90 dBc spurious response at 6 GHz output. High phase noise and spurs can cause tremendous problems for system designers. Error vector magnitude (EVM) is a very tight requirement for OFDM systems such as WiMAX. Phase noise causes a jitter in the EVM, whereas spurs cause EVM offsets. This leads to unacceptable packet error rates, or low data throughput rates.

“The ultra low phase noise, exceptional spurious performance and wide frequency range makes this on-chip synthesizer ideal for WiMAX applications," said Seste Dell'Aera, Kaben's vice president of marketing. "System designers can absolutely rely on the synthesizer not being the limiting technology in W-USB, digital TV, digital audio and other OFDM applications.”

Kaben's chief scientist, Jim Wight, himself a specialist in OFDM, said, "One major hurdle for WiMAX designers is how to deal with EVM issues. Having a clean signal source is one of the critical components to designing a successful architecture."

Originally designed in the IBM 7WL process, the design can be ported to popular process technologies for any SoC applications. The synthesizer is available as a Silicon-proven IP product licensed for SoC integration or to manufacturers as a standalone part.