Front-end receiver for low power, low complexity non-coherent UWB communications system

An ultrawide band front-end receiver for low power, low complexity communications system is designed and simulated. The receiver consists of an ultra wideband antenna, band-pass filter, low noise amplifier, variable gain amplifier, a Gilbert mixer for squaring and an integrator used for integrating the squared signal. The receiver is based on a non-coherent, energy collection approach, which makes the receiver highly independent of the shape of the received waveform. The bandwidth of the used signal in the system is 1 GHz at 3.1 GHz - 4.1 GHz which is attained by filtering the transmitted signal before and after antenna in transmitter and receiver, respectively. The design is made using a SiGe 0.35 μm BiCMOS process provided by Austria Microsystems.