C-band Frequency Generator for Space-Borne Synthetic Aperture Radar

This paper presents the design and implementation of a C-Band Frequency Generator developed for Space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar. This Frequency Generator subsystem generates stable and coherent reference signals for all the sub-systems of C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar payload. Frequency Generator based on frequency multiplication technique generates various coherent signals namely 500 MHz signal for digital clock, local oscillator (LO) signals of 900 MHz and 4500 MHz needed for receivers and chirp signal of 5400 & PLUSMN; 37.5 MHz. This chirp signal is generated by direct modulation of the full bandwidth baseband signal of DC-37.5 MHz at 4500 MHz and subsequently mixing with 900 MHz signal. Frequency generator unit is realized in a compact two-tier architecture, using a novel concept of full chirp modulation, resulting in 6 degrees rms phase error in the transmit chirp signal along with in-band spurious rejection better than 20 dBc, whereas other coherent frequencies resulting in out of band spurious rejection better than 53 dBc against the specification of 40 dBc.