A 2.48 pJ/pulse Low-Power IR-UWB Transmitter in 0.18-μm CMOS Process

This paper presents a low-power, OOK-modulated, impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transmitter. The pulse generation method is derived from a filtered combined edge technique, where narrow pulses are produced by a delay-and-logic gate and shaped with a filter to generate UWB pulses compliant with the FCC standard. The pulse-shaping filter and antenna driving circuit are co-designed and combined into one, that is, a pulse amplifying and shaping circuit that operates in the C-class state, resulting in extremely low complexity, low power, and small circuit area. The proposed IR-UWB transmitter was implemented and fabricated using a standard 0.18-mu m complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) 1p6m process. The power supply voltage is 1.5V and the targeted maximal data rate is 250Mbps. The chip measurement results show that the output UWB signal covers 3.1-6.0GHz frequency band, the power spectrum density conforms to the FCC spectrum masks, and the peak-to-peak voltage of the output UWB pulses is 183mV. In addition, the core area of the chip is 0.098mm(2) and the transmitter power consumption is 2.48 pJ per pulse.