An energy detection receiver for non-coherent IR-UWB

Abstract

A non-coherent receiver for impulse radio ultra-wide band (IR-UWB) is presented. The proposed receiver front-end consists of a high gain LNA, a high frequency detector and an intermediate frequency (IF) amplifier to amplify the recovered signal and drive an external test instrument. To meet the requirements of high gain and a low noise figure (NF) under moderate power consumption for the LNA, capacitor cross coupled (CCC) and current reuse techniques were adopted. The detector consists of a squarer and an integrator. The overall circuit consumes 41.2 mA current with a supply voltage of 1.8 V at a 400 MHz pulse rate. The resulting energy efficiency is 0.19 nJ/pulse. A chip prototype is implemented in 0.18-μm CMOS. The die area is 2.1 × 1.4 mm2 and the active area is 1.7 × 0.98 mm2.