Impulse Radio Ultra Wideband Pulse Research Articles

A Tunable CMOS IR-UWB Pulse Generator Based on Feedback Controlled Oscillator Switching

This brief presents a tunable Impulse-Radio Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) pulse generator based on feedback oscillator switching. The circuit provides a wide range of pulse amplitude and width tuning, thus enabling the required pulse shaping for a desired pulse repetition rate and/or a wireless transmission range. Feedback controlled switching prevents the potential omission of the UWB pulse generation and provides low UWB pulse energy variations at low bias currents and a wide temperature range, ensuring system robustness with respect to temperature variations. The pulse amplitude is tunable within 0.27 Vpp to 2.05 Vpp, while the pulse width tuning range is 1-6.5 ns. The total energy consumption of the IR-UWB pulse generator at the 50 Mpps pulse repetition rate is equal to 25.4 pJ/pulse for the pulse amplitude equal to 0.27 Vpp, while for the pulse amplitude equal to 2.05 Vpp, it is increased up to 99.8 pJ/pulse. The circuit occupies a core area of 0.56 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> in a 0.18 μm CMOS technology.

IR-UWB Pulse Generation Using FPGA Scheme for through Obstacle Human Detection.

This research proposes a scheme of field programmable gate array (FPGA) to generate an impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) pulse. The FPGA scheme consists of three parts: digital clock manager, four-delay-paths stratagem, and edge combiner. The IR-UWB radar system is designed to detect human subjects from their respiration underneath the rubble in the aftermath of an earthquake and to locate the human subjects based on range estimation. The proposed IR-UWB radar system is experimented with human subjects lying underneath layers of stacked clay bricks in supine and prone position. The results reveal that the IR-UWB radar system achieves a pulse duration of 540 ps with a bandwidth of 2.073 GHz (fractional bandwidth of 1.797). In addition, the IR-UWB technology can detect human subjects underneath the rubble from respiration and identify the location of human subjects by range estimation. The novelty of this research lies in the use of the FPGA scheme to achieve an IR-UWB pulse with a 2.073 GHz (117 MHz–2.19 GHz) bandwidth, thereby rendering the technology suitable for a wide range of applications, in addition to through-obstacle detection.

Circuit analysis and optimisation of the high‐voltage high‐efficiency IR‐UWB pulse generator for ranging and radar application

An in-depth circuital analysis of an energy-efficient high peak power impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) pulse generator monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) design is presented. The proposed IR-UWB pulse generation process is explained in detail. A trade-off between the peak output power level and the frequency of operation is discussed. The proposed circuit is optimised for the highest possible peak output power in the 3–5 GHz UWB band for ranging and radar application. The presented IR-UWB pulse former makes use of the cascode heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) configuration for signal scaling operation instead of the common emitter configuration. The proposed cascode pair configuration results in higher output voltage swing as well as reduced power consumption. The effect of coupling capacitors on amplification factor of the pulse former stages as well as impedance profile of the distributed transmission line is discussed in great detail. The temperature-dependent parasitic component in the proposed circuit is studied. Its effect on the transient behaviour of the proposed IR-UWB pulse generator is analysed, which is important for IR-UWB beamforming applications. The required mathematical model for the parasitic effect is derived and explained.

A Wireless-Powered IR-UWB Transmitter for Long-Range Passive RFID Tags in 90-nm CMOS

An impulse radio ultrawideband (IR-UWB) transmitter (TX) intended for long-range passive radio-frequency (RF) identification tags is presented. It is wirelessly powered by an ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) signal. A 128-bit pseudonoise code is transmitted when enough energy is harvested. A new on-off-keying multicycle energy-efficient IR-UWB pulse generator (PG) is proposed, and a co-design with power management circuits is introduced to improve the system supply noise performance. A novel injection-locking divider co-designed with an RF voltage rectifier is proposed to eliminate the injection input resistive load that exists in some designs; otherwise, the input sensitivity would be degraded. A proof-of-concept prototype is fabricated in a TSMC 90-nm CMOS process. Measurements show the TX input sensitivity to be approximately -17.5 dBm with a 900-MHz UHF input. The measured PG output swing is 195 mV <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">p-p</sub> with a -10 dB bandwidth of approximately 3.4 GHz.

Chirp Pulse Compression in Non-Coherent Impulse-Radio Ultra-Wideband Communications

The paper investigates chirp pulse compression as a signal dimension reduction technique in non-coherent impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) communications. Two common types of non-coherent IR-UWB detection are considered, energy detection of IR-UWB pulse position modulated (PPM) symbols and sample-wise differential detection of differential phase shift keying (DPSK) IR-UWB symbols, as well as a newly introduced sample-wise differential detection of IR-UWB PPM symbols. A common problem with these low-complexity IR-UWB detection schemes is poor performance when the dimension of the symbol in detection is high, which is usually the case at low data rates and is especially pronounced in interference environments. Chirp pulse compression mitigates this problem by reducing the dimension of the symbol in detection along with very small fading factor, which also lowers the computational complexity in the case of digital implementation. In the analytic part of the paper, we develop a closed-form expression for the bandwidth and dimension of the signal after the chirp pulse compression, which was lacking before. Furthermore, a closed-form expression of the bit error probability in white noise with the above detection schemes is also given. In the numerical part of the paper, we compare the performance with and without chirp pulse compression of the above modulation/detection pairs in noise and interference environments.

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

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.

Transmission of Multi-Band OFDM and Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband Signals Over Single Mode Fiber

In this paper we examine the transmission of two types of ultra-wideband (UWB) signals, multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) and impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB), over single mode fiber at 1550 nm. In order to investigate the impact of optical components such as laser diode, external modulator and single mode fiber on UWB signals, we develop mathematical models for these components. These models are experimentally verified and corresponding numerical parameter values are obtained by experiment. Using these models we discuss the transmission of two types of UWB signals over single mode fiber. A new figure of merit namely distortion factor is defined. Using this figure of merit the direct modulation of distributed feedback (DFB) laser diode and the external modulation with Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) are compared in terms of their impact on UWB signals. Using intensive simulation we also compare MB-OFDM and IR-UWB in terms of their sensitivity to the distortions of a UWB over fiber link using error vector magnitude (EVM) as a figure of merit. An EVM measurement is accomplished for a MB-OFDM over fiber link. The impact of IR-UWB pulse shape on its resistance to the nonlinearity of modulation transfer function is also investigated.