A High-Voltage UWB Pulse Generator Using Passive Amplification in 65-nm CMOS

Abstract

This paper proposes an ultra-wideband (UWB) pulse generator featuring high output amplitude for applications with long transmission and detection range. The output signal of a switch-mode power amplifier stage is passively amplified by a wideband matching network to produce output voltage amplitudes beyond the supply voltage level. Incorporating the parallel LC load of the power amplifier into the matching network and considering the constraints of the wideband matching when the power amplifier is ON and OFF, only a 2-section matching network is added for wideband matching. Employing a trapezoidal waveform as the input signal of the power amplifier, the design flexibility of the matching network to generate a regulation-compliant UWB pulse is further extended. Implemented in a 1-V 65-nm CMOS process, the proposed UWB pulse generator produces a UWB pulse with a de-embedded peak-to-peak amplitude (V <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">pp</sub> ) of 2.49 V, a bandwidth of 6.8 GHz and pulse duration of 0.5 ns achieving 249% peak-to-peak to supply voltage ratio.