Impulse Radio based Non-Coherent UWB Transceiver Architectures - An Example

This paper presents an overview of performance of non-coherent, ultra-wideband (UWB) impulse radio (IR) receivers specifically focusing on auto-correlation (AC) and energy detection (ED) receivers. In this paper, we use the term non-coherent receiver to denote a system where the phase of the received signal is not used in the detection and synchronization. The performance comparison is based on a simplified analysis of the bit error rate (BER) of different receivers for different modulation types; specifically binary pulse position modulation and binary pulse amplitude modulation. Compared with AC receivers, the ED receiver is significantly lower complexity supporting ease of implementation. An example implementation of one ED receiver architecture is presented. The test circuits of the transceiver are designed for 0.35 mum SiGe BiCMOS technology. The noise figure of the front-end of the ED receiver is 7.3 dB while the receiver gain is 34 dB. The power consumption of UWB-IR transceiver circuits is 136 mW with 100% duty cycle with a 3.3 V power supply