Time-of-Arrival Measurement Using Adaptive CMOS IR-UWB Range Finder With Scalable Resolution

This paper introduces an adaptive CMOS impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) range finder with scalable resolution for localization applications and presents a brief demonstration of its operation. The distance resolution of the proposed range finder can be adapted to the ranging environment using a two-step time-to-digital converter (TDC) with scalable delay cells. Using the scalable time resolution of the TDC, the proposed range finder can control its maximum detectable distance and range resolution without any change in hardware. The proposed CMOS IR-UWB range finder has been implemented with a 0.11-μm process; the effective areas of the transmitter and receiver are 0.065 mm² and 0.27 mm², respectively. The range finder has a range 8 m, with 2.9 mm scalable resolution. The power consumptions of the transmitter and receiver are 1.5 mW and 42 mW, respectively.