Pulse-Based, 100 Mbps UWB Transceiver

A pulse-based FCC-compliant ultra-wideband (UWB) transceiver is designed and integrated as a four chip and planar antenna solution. The signaling is based on 500 MHz-wide subbanded binary-phase-shift-keyed (BPSK) Gaussian pulses centered in one of 14 bands across the 3.1–10.6 GHz bandwidth. The system includes a UWB planar antenna, a Gaussian BPSK transmitter, a direct-conversion front-end, dual 500 MSps analog-to-digital converters, and a parallelized digital baseband for timing control and data demodulation. The RF local oscillators and baseband gain stages are implemented externally. A 100 Mbps wireless link is established with this chipset. A bit-error rate of 10-3 is observed at a -84 dBm sensitivity. This energy-aware receiver is implemented with strategic hardware hooks such that the quality of service is exchangeable with power consumption.