A Reconfigurable, 130 nm CMOS 108 pJ/pulse, Fully Integrated IR-UWB Receiver for Communication and Precise Ranging

This paper presents a fully integrated flexible ultra-low power UWB impulse radio receiver, capable of cm-accurate ranging. Ultra-low-power consumption is achieved by employing the quadrature analog correlating receiver architecture, by exploiting the duty-cycled nature of the system, by operating in the sub-1 GHz band as well as by careful circuit design. Two pulse rates, 39.0625 Mpulses per second (Mpps) and 19.531 Mpps, and a wide range of processing gains (0-18 dB) are supported. Also, the acquisition algorithm and accuracy can be adapted at run time. This flexible implementation allows to dynamically trade power consumption for performance depending on the operating conditions and the application requirements. The receiver prototype was manufactured in 130 nm CMOS and the active circuit area measures 4.52 mm2. The IC contains a complete analog front-end, digital backend and implements the algorithms necessary for acquisition, synchronization, data reception and ranging. Consuming 4.2 mW when operating at 39.0625 Mpps, it achieves an energy efficiency of 108 pJ/pulse. A 1.3 Mb/s wireless link over more than 10 m in an office-like environment has been demonstrated under direct line-of-sight (LOS) conditions with a raw packet-error-rate (PER) less than 10% and cm-accurate ranging.

[1]  J.R. Long,et al.  A quantized analog delay for an ir-UWB quadrature downconversion autocorrelation receiver , 2005, 2005 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband.

[2]  A.P. Chandrakasan,et al.  A 2.5 nJ/bit 0.65 V Pulsed UWB Receiver in 90 nm CMOS , 2007, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[3]  Umberto Mengali,et al.  M-PPM noncoherent receivers for UWB applications , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[4]  Anantha Chandrakasan,et al.  A 2.5nJ/b 0.65V 3-to-5GHz Subbanded UWB Receiver in 90nm CMOS , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers.

[5]  Rui Xu,et al.  Power-efficient switching-based CMOS UWB transmitters for UWB communications and Radar systems , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

[6]  Yuanjin Zheng,et al.  An ultra low power and high efficiency UWB transmitter for WPAN applications , 2008, ESSCIRC 2008 - 34th European Solid-State Circuits Conference.

[7]  Hannu Tenhunen,et al.  A remote-powered RFID tag with 10Mb/s UWB uplink and −18.5dBm sensitivity UHF downlink in 0.18µm CMOS , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference - Digest of Technical Papers.

[8]  Jan M. Rabaey,et al.  The Energy-per-Useful-Bit Metric for Evaluating and Optimizing Sensor Network Physical Layers , 2006, 2006 3rd Annual IEEE Communications Society on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks.

[9]  Pierangelo Terreni,et al.  A 10.6mW/0.8pJ power-scalable 1GS/s 4b ADC in 0.18 um CMOS with 5.8GHz ERBW , 2006 .

[10]  Y. Sanada,et al.  A CMOS ultra-wideband impulse radio transceiver for 1-mb/s data communications and /spl plusmn/2.5-cm range finding , 2006, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[11]  Ian Oppermann,et al.  An ultrawideband system architecture for tag based wireless sensor networks , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

[12]  B.P. Ginsburg,et al.  A 3.1 to 10.6 GHz 100 Mb/s Pulse-Based Ultra-Wideband Radio Receiver Chipset , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband.

[13]  I.D. O'Donnell,et al.  A 2.3mW Baseband Impulse-UWB Transceiver Front-End in CMOS , 2006, 2006 Symposium on VLSI Circuits, 2006. Digest of Technical Papers..

[14]  Denis C. Daly,et al.  A pulsed UWB receiver SoC for insect motion control , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference - Digest of Technical Papers.

[15]  Michiel Steyaert,et al.  CMOS Fractional-N Synthesizers: Design for High Spectral Purity and Monolithic Integration , 2003 .

[16]  Tadahiro Kuroda,et al.  A CMOS ultra-wideband impulse radio transceiver for 1-Mb/s data communications and ±2.5-cm range finding , 2006, VLSIC 2006.

[17]  David A. Johns,et al.  Analog Integrated Circuit Design , 1996 .

[18]  John G. Proakis,et al.  Digital Communications , 1983 .

[19]  Mourad N. El-Gamal,et al.  Design of low power CMOS ultra-wideband 3.1–10.6 GHz pulse-based transmitters , 2008, 2008 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference.

[20]  W. Dehaene,et al.  A flexible, ultra-low power 35pJ/pulse digital back-end for a QAC UWB receiver , 2007, ESSCIRC 2007 - 33rd European Solid-State Circuits Conference.

[21]  P. Andreani,et al.  On the use of MOS varactors in RF VCOs , 2000, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[22]  Geert Van der Plas,et al.  Ultra-wide-band transmitter for low-power wireless body area networks: design and evaluation , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.

[23]  Ramesh Harjani,et al.  Analysis and design of low-phase-noise ring oscillators , 2000, ISLPED'00: Proceedings of the 2000 International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (Cat. No.00TH8514).

[24]  Denis C. Daly,et al.  A 0.55V 16Mb/s 1.6mW non-coherent IR-UWB digital baseband with ±1ns synchronization accuracy , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference - Digest of Technical Papers.

[25]  M. Takamiya,et al.  A 1-V 299/spl mu/W Flashing UWB Transceiver Based on Double Thresholding Scheme , 2006, 2006 Symposium on VLSI Circuits, 2006. Digest of Technical Papers..

[26]  Y.H. Hu,et al.  CORDIC-based VLSI architectures for digital signal processing , 1992, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

[27]  A.P. Chandrakasan,et al.  A baseband processor for impulse ultra-wideband communications , 2005, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[28]  Marian Verhelst,et al.  DESIGN OF AN ENERGY-EFFICIENT PULSED UWB RECEIVER , 2007 .

[29]  A. Rabbachin,et al.  Front-end receiver for low power, low complexity non-coherent UWB communications system , 2005, 2005 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband.

[30]  Marian Verhelst,et al.  System design of an ultra-low power, low data rate, pulsed UWB receiver in the 0-960 MHz band , 2005, IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2005. ICC 2005. 2005.

[31]  W. Dehaene,et al.  System Design for Ultra-Low-Power UWB-based Indoor Localization , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband.

[32]  Laurent Ouvry,et al.  A 1.1nJ/b 802.15.4a-compliant fully integrated UWB transceiver in 0.13µm CMOS , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference - Digest of Technical Papers.

[33]  Urbashi Mitra,et al.  Generalized UWB transmitted reference systems , 2006, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[34]  R. Hoctor,et al.  Delay-hopped transmitted-reference RF communications , 2002, 2002 IEEE Conference on Ultra Wideband Systems and Technologies (IEEE Cat. No.02EX580).