A Low Power CMOS Transmitter Design for IR-UWB Communication Systems

A low power CMOS impulse-based transmitter with on-off keying (OOK) modulation scheme, for ultra-wideband (UWB) impulse radio (IR) system has been designed and laid out in a standard TSMC 0.18 mum CMOS technology. A novel design of Gaussian mono-pulse generator employing simple and robust first-derivative capacitive current-voltage characteristic has been presented. On-chip pulse shaping using an LC Band-Pass Filter (BPF) is developed to meet the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) spectrum requirement. The post-layout simulation results of the proposed UWB transmitter are analyzed. A Gaussian mono-pulse of less than 100 ps falling/rising time with a 130 mV_pp amplitude is obtained, at a clock frequency of 500 MHz. The total power dissipation of the transmitter is 1.2 mW with only 316 muW consumed by impulse generator. The output of the transmitter before antenna is 48 mV_pp under a 1.2 V power supply.