Wireless field bus communication with software defined IR-UWB in a manufacturing environment

This paper elaborates a concept for a wireless field bus communication with software defined ultra wide band with impulse radio modulation (IR-UWB) in manufacturing environments. A wireless field bus offers an important improvement to the smart factory due to increasing requirements for connectivity, adaptability and flexibility. Former analysis showed the benefit of using UWB technology for the wireless field bus transmission in manufacturing environment. In order to determine the best type of IR-UWB modulation a software defined radio system with direct sequence synthesizers is convenient. For this purpose on the transmitter side a digital-analog-converter (DAC) with 25 GS/s controlled by FPGA feeds directly the UWB antenna. On the receiver side the received signal is amplified by a low noise amplifier (LNA) and converted to a digital signal by an analog-digital-converter with as well 25 GS/s. The digital signal is further processed with a FPGA. This enables the adaptation of transmission parameters during operation. Thereby the transmission parameter, channels, antennas and RF components can be investigated.