A Pulsed UWB Transceiver in 65 nm CMOS With Four-Element Beamforming for 1 Gbps Meter-Range WPAN Applications

A pulsed ultrawideband (UWB) transceiver with four-element receiver beamforming is described. Multiband signaling with frequency hopping is employed to efficiently utilize spectrum from 6 to 8.5 GHz to achieve a high data rate of 1 Gbps. A pulse-based signaling approach with low implementation complexity is utilized. Frequency-hopping reduces the overhead for multiband implementation by sharing multiple circuit blocks in the transmitter and receiver paths. The sinusoids for pulse-shaping and single-sideband mixing are synthesized using multiphase LOs to avoid high-speed DACs. The receiver channelizes the spectrum with cascaded mixers for which the LO signals are derived from a single PLL. A single-input multi-output (SIMO) beamforming architecture is employed to increase the sensitivity of the receiver. Beamforming is performed at baseband to avoid the requirement for a wideband delay circuit. The prototype is implemented in 65 nm CMOS and meets the ECC mask. The measured power dissipation of the transmitter is 221 mW, while that of the receiver is 211 mW. A receiver sensitivity of -69 dBm is achieved and Gbps communication over 2 m is demonstrated.