New design of low power, 100 Mb-s IR-UWB pulse generator in 0.18 µm CMOS technology

Abstract

A new method of impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) pulse generation, with advantage of providing a “notch” like representation of pulse in the spectrum domain for particular control parameters values, is investigated in this paper. Low power pulse generator is composed of a glitch generator, a switched oscillator, a two-stage buffer and a pulse shaping filter. The proposed architecture, designed in UMC 0.18µm CMOS technology, can operate in a single band from 3.3GHz to 9.3GHz or in a double, lower and higher UWB band (from 3GHz to 9.15GHz), suppressing frequencies in the WLAN band. Both spectrums fully comply with the corresponding FCC spectral mask, while the pulse generator regime and the spectrum range are determined by control signal values. Post-layout simulation results showed a pulse width of 0.5ns, and a peak-to-peak amplitude of 211mV for one band spectrum. The average power consumption is 0.89mW corresponding to the energy consumption of 8.9pJ/pulse for 100MHz pulse repetition rate (PRF). The pulse duration is 1ns and peak-to-peak amplitude is 202mV in the case of the WLAN frequency band suppression. The total chip area is 0.31mm2. The pulse generator has been evaluated for the best performance supporting the on-off keying (OOK) modulation.