Non-coherent Impulse Radio Ultra-wideband Research Articles

An OOK and Binary FSK Reconfigurable Dual-Band Noncoherent IR-UWB Receiver Supporting Ternary Signaling

This article presents a multiband low-power and low-complexity impulse radio ultrawideband (IR-UWB) noncoherent receiver. The proposed receiver can be digitally reconfigured in three different modes of operation, including two single-band modes and one concurrent dual-band mode. In the two single-band modes, the proposed envelope detection architecture is capable of receiving and demodulating an on–off keying (OOK) pulse stream at RF center frequencies of 2.8 or 4.8 GHz. In the concurrent dual-band mode, the proposed architecture is able to demodulate binary frequency-shift keying (FSK), in addition to OOK demodulation, at center frequencies of 3 and 5 GHz. The receiver is composed of a reconfigurable low-power differential low noise amplifier (LNA), a fully differential squarer (self-mixer circuit), low-pass filter (LPF), and variable gain baseband (BB) amplifiers. The receiver is fabricated in TSMC 130-nm CMOS process technology. The receiver can operate at up to 150 Mb/s with the ternary signaling that is enabled by the binary FSK modulation combined with the OOK modulation in concurrent dual-band mode. At its maximum gain, the receiver achieves a sensitivity of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$-$</tex-math> </inline-formula> 72 dBm at a bit error rate (BER) of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$10^{-3}$</tex-math> </inline-formula> at a 100-Mb/s data rate. It consumes 11.9 and 13.2 mW from a 1.2-V supply in the single-band modes and concurrent dual-band mode, respectively.

A Low-Power Squaring Circuit with Regulated Output and Improved Settling Time in 180 nm CMOS for 3–5 GHz IR-UWB Applications

Abstract. This paper demonstrates a low-power squaring circuit for 3–5 GHz non-coherent Impulse-Radio Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) receivers for Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) in a low-cost 180 nm CMOS technology. The squaring, which is the key element in typical IR-UWB receivers, is performed exploiting the non-linear transfer function of a MOS transistor. For a high gain at low power consumption the transistor is biased in the moderate inversion region, where the second-order derivative of the transconductance gm and, as a result, the quadratic term in the transfer function reaches a maximum. A control loop was implemented to set the dc output voltage to a defined value and thus to allow a comparison of the squarer output signal with a defined threshold voltage, which can easily be set and adjusted (e.g. by a DAC). To speed up the settling time of the output and hence to reach higher data rates, a novel slew-rate booster is implemented at the output. Thereby, the squarer is capable of data rates of up to 15.6 Mbit s−1, which is more than two times higher compared to the circuit without the slew-rate booster, while only consuming 72.4 µW in addition. In the extracted post-layout simulations the whole circuitry consumes 724 µA at a 1.8 V power supply, resulting in a power consumption of 1.3 mW.

Compact digital implementation of a non‐coherent IR‐UWB transmitter and receiver

Non-coherent impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transceivers are attractive candidates for applications where the silicon area and power consumption are relatively limited. This study presents the compact digital architecture design and implementation of a non-coherent IR-UWB transmitter and receiver based on the energy detection scheme, including the synchroniser module. The software models of the designed transceiver are simulated and verified in both floating-point and fixed-point numerical representations. The synthesisable Verilog description of the transmitter and receiver architectures is simulated and verified against their fixed-point simulation model. The transmitter and receiver are implemented in the authors custom-developed field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board. The bit error rate performance of the transmitter and receiver is measured in real-time on the FPGA, utilising an accurate on-chip Gaussian noise generator. The characteristics and implementation results of the transmitter and receiver architecture on the FPGA are presented. An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) architecture of the IR-UWB transceiver is estimated to occupy 0.0227 mm 2 and dissipate 760 mW from a 1.0 V supply while operating at 82 MHz in a standard 32 nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology.

Noncoherent IR-UWB Receiver Using Massive Antenna Arrays for Wireless Sensor Networks

Noncoherent impulse radio ultrawideband (UWB) receivers do not require channel state information and are also robust against pulse shape distortions. However, their performance is suboptimal, especially at low signal-to-noise ratios. In this article, we propose simple noncoherent UWB receivers for wireless sensor network applications using massive antenna arrays. Two receivers are proposed: based on instantaneous received UWB signal energy and based on weighted instantaneous received UWB signal energy. The proposed receivers use the law of large numbers resulting from the massive receiver arrays and utilize the large degrees of freedom available in a UWB multipath channel. Furthermore, the proposed receivers do not require training symbols for the estimation of decision threshold. Both these receivers outperform the existing noncoherent receivers as verified using simulation results on the standardized IEEE 802.15.4a UWB multipath channel.

A self-duty-cycled 7.2–8.5 GHz IR-UWB receiver for low power and low data rate applications

A self-duty-cycled non-coherent impulse radio-ultra wideband receiver targeted at low-power and low-data-rate applications is presented. The receiver is implemented in a 130 nm CMOS technology and works in the 7.2---8.5 GHz UWB band, which covers the IEEE 802.15.4a and 802.15.6 mandatories high-band channels. The receiver architecture is based on a non-coherent RF front-end (high gain LNA and pulse detector) followed by a synchronizer block (clock and data recovery or CDR function and window generation block), which enables to shut down the power-hungry LNA between pulses to strongly reduce the receiver power consumption. The main functions of the receiver, i.e. the RF front-end and the CDR block, were measured stand-alone. A maximum gain of 40 dB at 7.2 GHz is measured for the LNA. The RF front-end achieves a very low turn-on time (<1 ns) and an average sensitivity of ź92 dBm for a 10ź3 BER at a 1 Mbps data rate. A root-mean-square (RMS) jitter of 7.9 ns is measured for the CDR for a power consumption of 54 µW. Simulation results of the fully integrated self-duty-cycled 7.2---8.5 GHz IR-UWB receiver (that includes the measured main functions) confirm the expected performances. The synchronizer block consumes only 125 µW and the power consumption of the whole receiver is 1.8 mW for a 3% power duty-cycle (on-window of 30 ns).

On the Variance-Based Detection for Impulse Radio UWB Systems

A variance detection (VD)-based impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) system has the potential of mitigating narrowband interference (NBI), even in multipath environments. However, as a highly nonlinear system, which involves fourth-order multiplications, comprehensive analysis and evaluations of its performances have not been seen so far. In this paper, we address the issues by developing a log-normal random distribution model for the VD-based IR-UWB receiver and deriving the analytical bit-error-rate formulas for the system in both additive white Gaussian noise and CM1 multipath channels with and without NBIs for the first time. Furthermore, through both theoretical analysis and simulations, we show that the presented VD-based receivers can outperform the conventional energy-detection-based and the fourth-order detection-based receivers and have a stronger inherent ability to mitigate destructive performance degradation caused by strong NBIs. This makes the VD-based IR-UWB system a good candidate as a non-coherent IR-UWB receiver for low power and low complexity applications.

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.

Comparison of Kurtosis and Fourth Power Detectors with Applications to IR-UWB OOK Systems

On-off keying (OOK) is one of the modulation schemes for non-coherent impulse radio Ultra-wideband systems. In this paper, the utilization of the kurtosis detector (KD) and fourth power detector (FD) receivers for OOK signaling is introduced. We investigate the effect of integration interval and the optimum threshold on the performance of energy detector (ED), KD and FD receivers. The semi analytic expression of BER is obtained by using generalized extreme value distribution function for KD and FD receivers. From performance point of view, the simulation results show that FD receiver outperforms KD and ED receivers. In contrast, the sensitivity to the optimum threshold is greatly reduced in KD receiver compared to ED and FD receivers.

An energy detection receiver for non-coherent IR-UWB

A non-coherent receiver for impulse radio ultra-wide band (IR-UWB) is presented. The proposed receiver front-end consists of a high gain LNA, a high frequency detector and an intermediate frequency (IF) amplifier to amplify the recovered signal and drive an external test instrument. To meet the requirements of high gain and a low noise figure (NF) under moderate power consumption for the LNA, capacitor cross coupled (CCC) and current reuse techniques were adopted. The detector consists of a squarer and an integrator. The overall circuit consumes 41.2 mA current with a supply voltage of 1.8 V at a 400 MHz pulse rate. The resulting energy efficiency is 0.19 nJ/pulse. A chip prototype is implemented in 0.18-μm CMOS. The die area is 2.1 × 1.4 mm2 and the active area is 1.7 × 0.98 mm2.

A 3-5 GHz Non-Coherent IR-UWB Receiver

A fully integrated inductorless CMOS impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) receiver is implemented using 0.18 ㎛ CMOS technology for 3-5 ㎓ application. The UWB receiver adopts the non-coherent architecture, which removes the complexity of RF architecture and reduces power consumption. The receiver consists of inductorless differential three stage LNA, envelope detector, variable gain amplifier (VGA), and comparator. The measured sensitivity is -70 ㏈m in the condition of 5 Mbps and BER of 10?³. The receiver chip size is only 1.8 ㎜ × 0.9 ㎜. The consumed current is 15 ㎃ with 1.8 V supply.

Selective Signal Combining for Effective BER Improvement in Noncoherent IR-UWB Systems

In order to effectively improve the BER (Bit Error Rate) performance of noncoherent IR-UWB (Impulse Radio Ultra Wide Band) systems utilizing 2PPM (Binary Pulse Position Modulation), we propose a selective signal combining scheme which performs selective combination of received signals by estimating the SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of the energies during the pulse width interval.

Searchback Algorithms for TOA Estimation in Non-coherent Low-rate IR-UWB Systems

Non-coherent ultra-wideband (UWB) receivers offer an attractive low-complexity solution to ranging with UWB radios. They use a simple receiver architecture that can operate at very low sampling rates compared to the Nyquist rate. In this paper, time-of-arrival (TOA) estimation performances of two different searchback algorithms for non-coherent impulse radio UWB systems are analyzed: jump back and search forward (JBSF) and serial backward search (SBS). Average ranging errors for both algorithms are formulated using noise-based ranging thresholds and at sub-Nyquist sampling rates. For JBSF, a lower bound on the average ranging error is obtained using an error-minimizing threshold. Also, a semi-analytic technique for the selection of the searchback window length is presented. For SBS, noise-based threshold selection for both single-cluster and multi-cluster channels are introduced. Computer simulations in IEEE 802.15.4a channels provide insights on the selection of some of the critical parameters for accurate ranging. The simulation results show that JBSF typically performs better than SBS if the inter-cluster delay parameter (K) is not selected appropriately for SBS. In both cases, it is shown that even at sampling rates much smaller than the Nyquist rate, ranging accuracies on the order of 33 cm can be obtained using a non-coherent UWB receiver.