An energy-aware and scalable UWB Impulse Radio baseband supporting coherent reception

A scalable low power Impulse Radio (IR) receiver baseband has been developed for an around-the-body audio streaming use case, supporting both coherent and non-coherent operation modes. With careful hardware/software co-optimization, the receiver algorithms are implemented using an Application-Specific-Instruction-set-Processor (ASIP) and several optimized hardware accelerators, allowing scalability and support of multi-mode operations in an energy-efficient manner. The receiver baseband is designed in a 90 nm standard CMOS process and is fully verified with the RF frontend. By using an all-digital parallel synchronization module, a short timing acquisition phase is realized, reducing synchronization overhead. In combination with a comprehensive set of low power measures, including hardware/software partitioning, parallelism, module level clock gating, multiple clock domains, operand isolation, multi voltage domains (MVD) and power gating techniques, an average power consumption of 5.6 mW for a 0.85 Mb/sec data rate mode is realized. This corresponds to 10.1pJ/bit for the coherent data processing of an 84 data bytes packet. Furthermore, the design is capable of processing 499.2 MSamples/sec at 840 mV.