SC-UWB: A low-complexity UWB technology for portable devices

Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology has attracted widespread attention all over the world because of potential applications in high-rate short-range communications. The existing UWB technologies, e.g., the direct-sequence UWB (DS-UWB) and the multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM), have high complexity, which results in high power consumption and cost, and limits its marketing. In this paper we propose and introduce a single carrier UWB (SC-UWB) technology based on a deep investigation of the existing UWB technologies. The proposed SC-UWB technology has much lower complexity, and aims at low-power portable applications. Also, we show some experimental results on the SC-UWB technology and present the fabricated SC-UWB chip. The measured results show that the SC-UWB can achieve good performance in a practical office environment, and the die size can be reduced by about 41.88% compared to that of the published MB-OFDM chips.