Impulse radio ultra-wideband transceiver design

This thesis presents a novel, digitally configurable, switching oscillator-based impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transmitter that is robust to process variations. The pulse width and pulse position properties of the output waveform are configurable to ensure operation for the desired bandwidth and output pulse energy values. The architecture is based on a cross-coupled LC voltage-controlled oscillator (LC VCO) implemented with a custom-designed on-chip balun at a center frequency of 2.4 GHz. The presented IR-UWB transmitter that occupies a total area of 0.35 mm2 is fabricated in the United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) 180-nm mixed-mode/radio frequency (MM/RF) CMOS process. The measured output voltage swing of the fabricated transmitter is 0.812 Volts on a 50-Ω antenna load for the 200 Mb/s data rate. The fabricated transmitter can drive 50 Ω, 75 Ω and 100 Ω loads with measured efficiency values 4.16%, 5.76%, and 4.05%, respectively. Compared to other works in the literature, this design achieves a higher output pulse energy at a higher data rate while maintaining low power consumption and, thus, high efficiency. For the IR-UWB receiver side, a differential common-source (CS) cascode LNA with inductive source degeneration is implemented for the RF front-end. Additionally, the subsequent variable gain amplifier (VGA) and mixer blocks are designed for potential future applications in coherent and non-coherent architectures. The fabricated components include an IR-UWB receiver front-end with a cascode CS LNA and a source follower buffer stage for LNA measurements. The fabricated RX occupies a total area of 1.47 mm2 and the transmitted UWB signal from the proposed transmitter was successfully measured on the receiver side during the chip testing procedure.