IR-UWB single-chip transceiver for high-band operation compliant to IEEE 802.15.4a

This paper describes a monolithic integrated single-chip transceiver intended for impulse radio (IR) - Ultra-wide Band (UWB) applications compliant to the IEEE 802.15.4a standard. The transceiver operates in the higher UWB band on the mandatory channel #9 (7.9872 GHz). The implemented nominal data rate is 850 kb/sec. The presented chip consists of the entire RF-front-end, 6-bit-resolution successive approximation register (SAR) analogue-to-digital converter (ADC), and the baseband processor running with a clock of 31.2 MHz. The analogue frontend can be further segmented into a pulse generation and transmit part and a quadrature direct down conversion receiver part, whereas both parts share a frequency synthesizer based on an integer-N phase-locked loop (PLL). The impulse generation is based on the gated oscillator principle allowing required on-off keying (OOK) as well as binary phase shift keying (BPSK). While the receiver supports both, coherent and non-coherent impulse detection, here only non-coherent operation will be presented. The baseband processor part contains a separated 499.2 MHz clocked block for transmitter control and provides a serial peripheral interface (SPI) for data exchange with an external micro controller. The presented chip was fabricated in a 0.25 μm SiGe:C BiCMOS technology occupying a Si area of 3.25 - 3.25 mm².