Performance Analysis of a 10-Gb/s Millimeter-Wave Impulse Radio Transmitter

Abstract

This paper presents analytical results of the effects of jitter and inter symbol interference (ISI) on a millimeter-wave impulse radio (IR) transceiver, compared with performance of the developed 10-Gb/s W-band IR transmitter prototype. The compact and cost-effective IR transmitter consists of a pulse generator (PG) that creates a short pulse with a duration of <10 ps, a band-pass filter (BPF) that shapes the short pulse to the desired millimeter-wave pulse (wavelet), and a power amplifier (PA) which is deployed as an option. Jitters of the PG and ISI from the BPF are a great issue to make the IR transceiver robust and to obtain excellent performance. One analysis verified that, thanks to a novel retiming architecture, the random jitter and the data dependent jitter from the PG give only a small penalty of <0.5-dB increase in signal to noise ratio (SNR) for achieving a bit error rate (BER) of <10−12. The alternative analysis on the effect of ISI from the BPF indicated that using a Gaussian BPF enables transmission with a BER of <10−12 up to a data rate of 1.4 times as large as a bandwidth of the BPF, whereas the ISI analysis suggested that mismatching of the skirt characteristics of the developed BPF to those of a Gaussian BPF causes tail lobes following the wavelet, resulting in an on/off ratio of <15 dB and hence an SNR penalty of <6 dB.