Abstract
Abstract. This paper demonstrates a low-power squaring circuit for 3–5 GHz non-coherent Impulse-Radio Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) receivers for Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) in a low-cost 180 nm CMOS technology. The squaring, which is the key element in typical IR-UWB receivers, is performed exploiting the non-linear transfer function of a MOS transistor. For a high gain at low power consumption the transistor is biased in the moderate inversion region, where the second-order derivative of the transconductance gm and, as a result, the quadratic term in the transfer function reaches a maximum. A control loop was implemented to set the dc output voltage to a defined value and thus to allow a comparison of the squarer output signal with a defined threshold voltage, which can easily be set and adjusted (e.g. by a DAC). To speed up the settling time of the output and hence to reach higher data rates, a novel slew-rate booster is implemented at the output. Thereby, the squarer is capable of data rates of up to 15.6 Mbit s−1, which is more than two times higher compared to the circuit without the slew-rate booster, while only consuming 72.4 µW in addition. In the extracted post-layout simulations the whole circuitry consumes 724 µA at a 1.8 V power supply, resulting in a power consumption of 1.3 mW.
Highlights
With the evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) and the emergence of Body Area Networks, the demand for low-power transceiver systems has increased
This paper demonstrates a low-power squaring circuit for 3–5 GHz non-coherent Impulse-Radio UltraWideband (IR-UWB) receivers for Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) in a low-cost 180 nm CMOS technology
A promising candidate for this kind of communication is Impulse-Radio UltraWideband (IR-UWB) technology, which is capable of lowpower high-speed communication over short distances using simple modulation schemes like On-Off-Keying (OOK) or Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) (Thotahewa et al, 2014; Daoud et al, 2014; Crepaldi et al, 2011)
Summary
With the evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) and the emergence of Body Area Networks, the demand for low-power transceiver systems has increased. A typical way to receive this kind of signals is by squaring and integrating them. This can be done in various ways ranging from multiplying the signal with itself using active (Stoica et al, 2006; Xia et al, 2011) or passive mixers (TuanAnh Phan et al, 2007) or by squaring the signal exploiting the transfer characteristic of a MOS transistor (Parvizi et al, 2012). This paper proposes a low-power squaring circuit for 3– 5 GHz IR-UWB applications for PPM, which exploits the MOS transistor’s transfer characteristics for the squaring. The paper is organized in four sections: Sect. 2 illustrates the concept and circuit architecture, Sect. The paper is organized in four sections: Sect. 2 illustrates the concept and circuit architecture, Sect. 3 summarizes the simulation results, and Sect. 4 concludes the paper
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