Design of 3–5 GHz tunable memristor-based OOK-UWB transmitter

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a tunable memristor-based On-off keying (OOK) impulse-radio ultrawideband (IR-UWB) transmitter (TX), operating within the 3–5 GHz band. The proposed TX contains a CMOS-Memristor-based Ring Oscillator, an OOK modulator, a control signals circuit, and a pulse shape filter. The linear programming of the memristor device offers a smooth linear frequency variation of the ring oscillator. Accordingly, in the proposed circuit, two external control signals Vctrl and Vtune are used to tune the memristance value and the output pulse width, respectively, allowing adjusting the power spectral density (PSD) bandwidth and its central frequency. The IR-UWB TX is suitable for OOK modulation schema. It is designed and simulated using TSMC CMOS 0.18 µm technology with a 1.8 V supply voltage. The simulation results show that the proposed TX can cover both narrowband and wideband UWB PSD, depending on the number of oscillations per emitted pulse. The TX output swing is 483mVpp, and the pulse duration is 0.8 ns for narrowband and 1.74 ns for wideband. For a pulse repetition frequency of 10 MHz, the pulse generator consumes 94.8 µW and accomplishes an energy efficiency of 23.4%, while the total energy consumption is 9.48 pJ/pulse.