Largely reconfigurable impulse radio UWB transceiver

Abstract

This letter presents a new and efficient digital baseband architecture for impulse radio ultra wideband (IR-UWB) transceivers with reconfigurable capacities for wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. An implementation is done on FPGA for validation by measurements. It achieves the highest data rate and the largest number of operating modes for an IR-UWB reconfigurable transceiver, to the best of the author's knowledge. Measurements demonstrate reconfigurability in data rate (from 4 to 125 MBits/s), chip duration (from 8 to 32 ns), pulse duration (from 1 to 4 ns), bit duration (from 8 to 256 ns), processing gain (from 1 to 8 pulses/bit), occupied bandwidth, radio range, BER performance, synchronization accuracy (from 0.5 to 4 ns), pulse amplitude, transmitted power density, duty cycle (from 3 to 50 %), power consumption, spectrum occupation, and maximum supported UWB channel delay spread (from 4 to 31 ns).