A tunable OOK IR-UWB pulse generator in 0.18 µm technology

A new energy-efficient, tunable impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) pulse generator is investigated in the paper. The low complexity architecture is composed of a data and clock synchronization block, a glitch generator, an impulses combiner, and a pulse shaping filter. It is designed and simulated in low-cost 0.18 μm UMC CMOS technology. The simulation results showed spectrum that covers whole UWB band and fully complies with the corresponding FCC spectral mask. The pulse duration is around 0.8 ns, and the peak-to-peak amplitude is 488 mV on 50 O output load. It has low power consumption of 1.1 mW corresponding to energy consumption of 11 pJ per pulse for 100 MHz pulse repetition frequency (PRF).

I. Introduction

Ultra-wideband technology, regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in February 2002 for commercial communication use in the 3.1–10.6 GHz frequency band [1], is promising for short and medium-range wireless data communication, imaging, and high-precision ranging application. There are several approaches within the UWB developed to satisfy the communication market requirements. The carrier-based transmission approaches (multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-MB-OFDM, and direct-sequence - DS) demand complex digital-signal processing, modulation and deep compression for achieving necessary data rate [2], [3], and thus apparently increase the complexity, power and costs of the UWB transceiver. Impulse radio ultra wideband (IR-UWB) technique uses extremely short pulses (duration less than 1 ns) which spectrum occupies a few GHz frequency range. The approach has advantageous features such as low complexity (without mixer and power amplifier), low-cost and energy efficient UWB transmitter architecture allowing simple modulation scheme (e.g. on-off keying - OOK) [4]. Additionally, the protocol offers high fading margin for communication systems in multipath environments, high time and range resolution, and low probability of undesired detection and interception [4]. The IR-UWB transceivers appear to be greatly attractive for very high data rate short-range communication, low data rate communication related to localization or/and positioning systems [5], [6], biomedical applications such as wireless personal area networks [7], interchip communications [8], [9], and UWB biotelemetry [10], [11].