An All-Digital 12 pJ/Pulse IR-UWB Transmitter Synthesized From a Standard Cell Library

This paper presents an all-digital impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transmitter. All functional blocks in the transmitter are implemented with digital standard cells and automatically place-and-routed by design tools. The center frequency and the bandwidth of the UWB pulses are digitally tuned to compensate for variations, or target different applications. This paper also proposes a calibration scheme and modeling of a cell-based digitally controlled oscillator (DCO), which takes systematic mismatch from automatic place-and-route into account. The transmitter is fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process, and occupies a core area of 0.032 mm². The transmitter operates in the 3.1-5.0 GHz UWB band with leakage power of 170 μW and active energy consumption ranges from 8 pJ/pulse to 16 pJ/pulse, which combine to a total minimum energy/pulse of 12 pJ/pulse at 50 Mb/s.