An ultra wideband impulse radio low complexity transceiver architecture for sensor networks

In this paper, the architecture of a non-coherent low-complexity ultra wideband impulse radio (UWB-IR) transceiver architecture for low data rate, low complexity tag based sensor networks is presented. The UWB-IR receiver utilises a non-coherent, energy detection-based approach, which makes it largely independent of the shape of the transmit waveform and robust to multipath channels. The UWB-IR transmitter utilises a delay locked loop (DLL) frequency synthesis approach and UWB monocycle pulse generator. The UWB-IR ASIC is manufactured in 0.35 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The simulated power consumption of UWB-IR transceiver circuits is 136 mW with 100% duty cycle with a 3.3 V power supply.