High rate UWB CMOS transceiver chipset for WBAN and biomedical applications

Abstract

This work presents a high rate UWB transceiver chipset implemented in a 130 nm CMOS technology for WBAN and biomedical applications in the 3–5 GHz band. The transmitter architecture is based on a double-filter excitation technique that can generate high magnitude pulses and address bipolar modulations such as BPSK. Measurements show that bipolar pulses with a peak-to-peak voltage of 1.9 Vpp for a power consumption of 139 µW@100 kbps can be generated. The receiver is a non-coherent architecture based on LNA followed by an envelope detector. A BER of 10−3 is achieved for a 3–5 GHz input peak-to-peak amplitude of 3.4 mVpp which corresponds to a −89.3 dBm sensitivity at 100 kbps. The energy consumption of the receiver and of the transmitter is respectively 0.144 nJ/bit and 196 pJ/bit at 100 Mbps. To improve the budget link of our non-coherent based transceiver a Randomly Alternate OOK signaling is proposed which leads to an estimated communication range of 2.36 m in a free space propagation channel.