Robust front-end design for ultra wideband systems

Ultra wideband (UWB) systems provide high data rates for wireless systems but are also challenged by high power, narrowband interferers falling within the band of interest. This paper proposes an RF front-end implementation to adaptively remove a narrowband, high power interferer from a UWB signal. These signals can drive front-end electronics into saturation, resulting in the loss of the UWB signal. The system is based on an analog implementation of the LMS algorithm. In this study two antenna sensors and analog signal processing are utilized to remove one interferer. This can be extended to more interferers when utilizing additional antenna elements. As opposed to varactor diode based notch filters, this filter implementation achieves wide tuning ranges and can be fully integrated in CMOS. Matlab simulations show that the impact of the adaptive interferer removal on the UWB band can be limited to a narrow frequency band preserving most of the UWB signal power