The Design of an Energy-Efficient IR-UWB Transmitter With Wide-Output Swing and Sub-Microwatt Leakage Current

Abstract

In this brief, we present an impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transmitter for low-power communication and radar sensing applications. To improve the leakage power for the IR-UWB transmitter, we have adopted transistor stacking technique in the design of our digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) and mask generator. The DCO and mask generator circuit generate the UWB carrier frequency and pulse mask signals, respectively. These signals are combined through a cascode output driver stage with an on-chip inductor load. The cascode structure significantly reduces the leakage power. The on-chip inductor load improves the transmitted pulse amplitude. As a result, our proposed transmitter has significantly reduced the leakage power to sub-micro watt and achieved a maximum amplitude of 0.94 V. Therefore, we are able to achieve a maximum efficiency of 8.6% and the transmitted energy per pulse is 3.6-pJ.