A 1.5-V 5-GHz phase-locked loop (PLL) based frequency synthesizer is design in a TSMC 0.18-um CMOS 1P6M technology. We apply the integrated-N architecture to design the frequency synthesizer. The synthesizer consists of a PLL that controls a LC tank voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) tuned at 5-GHz. The power consumption of the synthesizer is reduced by using a novel divide-by-two circuit as the first frequency divider in the PLL feedback loop. The synthesizer consumes 22.5 mW of power of which 8.1 mW is consumed by the VCO and the divide-by-two circuit combined. The phase noise is -110 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset. This PLL intended for wireless LAN (WLAN) applications can synthesize frequencies between 4.1 and 5.4 GHz.