Differential output of RF transceiver - RF Cafe Forums

RF Cafe Forums closed its virtual doors in late 2012 mainly due to other social media platforms dominating public commenting venues. RF Cafe Forums began sometime around August of 2003 and was quite well-attended for many years. By 2012, Facebook and Twitter were overwhelmingly dominating online personal interaction, and RF Cafe Forums activity dropped off precipitously. Regardless, there are still lots of great posts in the archive that ware worth looking at. Below are the old forum threads, including responses to the original posts. Here is the full original RF Cafe Forums on Archive.org

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Post subject: Frequency Synthesizer IC

Unread postPosted: Tue Apr 05, 2005 8:48 am

Hello!

Has anyone worked with synthesizer ICs of "Silicon Laboratories"?

Is Silicon Laboratories better than National Semiconductors and Analog Devices?

Who has worked with Si4133? Thanks for help.

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Guest

Post subject: Re: Frequency Synthesizer IC

Unread postPosted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 10:37 am

Anonymous wrote:

Hello!

Has anyone worked with synthesizer ICs of "Silicon Laboratories"?

Is Silicon Laboratories better than National Semiconductors and Analog Devices?

Who has worked with Si4133? Thanks for help.

Their normalized noise contribution of the chip (dectector,dividers,etc) is about the same. If you are interested in using an internal VCO (although the Si4133 is not truely internal, you need external tuning components) then the Si4133 will work for you. You you want good phase noise aided by a "nice" external VCO, you have more flexibility with the national or analog devices parts. National is generally cheaper than Analog Devices, and the later parts released by National competes well with analog devices in performance. Other factors such as max RF freq, max detector freq, divider resolution, etc, may determine who you use.

I don't work for any of these companies.

-Hon

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Post subject:

Unread postPosted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 10:55 am

Hello,

From my experience with ADF4360 synthersizers with integrated VCO, their phase noise performance is less compared to a synthesizer with independent VCO. The main advantage is of course less board space.

If you can afford board space I would recommend to choose the good old technique of discrete VCO and discrete PLL IC.

Posted  11/12/2012