Emitters and Receivers for Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband and Their Healthcare Applications

Healthcare applications requirements are presented in this paper and a state-of-the-art analysis shows that Impulse Radio Ultra-WideBand (IR-UWB) is particularly suitable in terms of energy efficiency for this type of short range communications for which different data rates are needed. Power saving strategies for emitters and receivers are then discussed and three examples of implementations are presented with their measurement results. The first is a versatile transmitter with tunable bandwidth which exhibits 0.9Vpp pulses and a power consumption of at least 11.03mW at 50Mbps. The second is a 3.1-10.6GHz transmitter with a power management scheme implemented on-chip which exhibits 2Vpp pulses and a power consumption of 7.3uW at 100kbps and 3.4mW at 100Mbps. The last is a non-coherent 3-5GHz receiver with -89dBm sensitivity at 100kbps and 144pJ/bit energy consumption when used in a power gated 100Mbps burst mode.