10ns Start-up techniques for a duty cycled Impulse Radio receiver

This paper presents fast start-up techniques for duty cycled Impulse Radio receivers. Three different techniques are used to improve the start-up time of individual blocks. DC coupling between the mixer and the VGA is used to ensure a fast start-up time for the whole chain, resulting in an overall start-up time below 10ns. This is the fastest startup time reported for duty cycled Impulse Radio receivers. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to detail the start-up techniques that enable ultra-low power consumption in this class of receivers. The measured power consumption is scaling proportionally to the duty cycling rate from 46mW in continuous mode down to 58uW for <;0.01% duty cycle rate.