Parallel OFDM Signal Generation for UWB Systems

A parallel signal generation scheme for OFDM signals is presented. Conventionally, the generation of OFDM signals is implemented by computing an inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT). If the bandwidth is very large, as in ultra-wide band (UWB) systems, preferably integrated solutions are used to generate the communication signals. Additionally, the output of the IDFT is protected against multipath propagation effects with either a cyclic extension or zero-padding. The system described in this paper enables the implementation of a UWB OFDM signal on low complexity and low cost hardware by generating subband OFDM signals. We show that additional errors are introduced on the subband edges, however. A performance study in terms of symbol error rate (SER) has been conducted. The results show that similar SER performance is achieved when either using a highly integrated solution or our parallel signal generation approach