A Pulse-Based Full-Band UWB Transceiver SoC in 0.18μm SiGe BiCMOS

In this paper, a single-chip pulse-based, non- carrier, full-band, low power ultra wideband (UWB) transceiver system-on-a-chip (SoC) for high data rate wireless video/audio/multimedia streaming applications is presented. This UWB SoC features a single full-band (7.5 GHz bandwidth from 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz), pulse-based non-carrier architecture to achieve high throughput (>100 Mbps) and high simplicity. It consists of low-noise amplifier (LNA), correlator, integrator, pulse generator, power switches and timing controller. This digital-ready UWB SoC features an on-chip analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The SoC uses BPSK modulation, Gaussian pulsing, and a global switching technique for power reduction. As the result, the average power consumption of the transceiver (no ADC) is 6 mW only. The SoC is designed in a commercial 0.18 mum SiGe BiCMOS technology.