A power efficient impulse generator for 6‐9 GHz UWB applications

Abstract

AbstractThis article presents a VCO‐based impulse generator, in which all circuit blocks are switched for low power consumption. A switching control pulse generator is employed for adjusting the impulse duration. The drive amplifier can generate triangular‐like impulse with high amount of side‐lobe rejection without any external filter. The experimental results show that the frequency range covers 6.5‐9.3 GHz and 10‐dB bandwidth is tunable from 0.5‐2 GHz, while consuming only 39.6 pJ/pulse at 10 MHz pulse repetition frequency. The impulse generator is fabricated using a 0.13 μm CMOS process and chip size is 1.07 × 1.50 mm2 including ESD pads.