System design of an ultra-low power, low data rate, pulsed UWB receiver in the 0-960 MHz band

This paper describes a complete system architecture for an ultra-low power, pulsed UWB receiver in the 0-960 MHz band for low data rate communication (10 kbps) in sensor networks, together with its acquisition algorithms and performance evaluation. Power consumption of this receiver is decreased impressively in relation to common fully digital receivers by shifting the matched filter operation to the analog domain, by using efficient acquisition schemes and by introducing extreme parallelism in the baseband. The optimal trade-off between a low power design and a good performance gain is searched. Sub 10 mW active power and sub 10 μW standby power are targeted, to achieve an average power consumption (analog + baseband) of 70 μW for data rates of 10 kbps, while realizing a processing gain of almost 30 dB.