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.

[1]  Brian P. Ginsburg,et al.  Low-Power Impulse UWB Architectures and Circuits , 2009, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[2]  P. Gray,et al.  All-MOS charge redistribution analog-to-digital conversion techniques. I , 1975, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[3]  Christoph Sandner,et al.  A subpicosecond jitter PLL for clock generation in 0.12-/spl mu/m digital CMOS , 2003 .

[4]  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.

[5]  Yuanjin Zheng,et al.  A 0.18μm CMOS 802.15.4a UWB Transceiver for Communication and Localization , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference - Digest of Technical Papers.

[6]  Dan Kreiser,et al.  Performance and design of IR-UWB transceiver baseband for wireless sensors , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband.

[7]  Byunghoo Jung,et al.  A fully integrated 802.15.4a IR-UWB Transceiver in 0.13µm CMOS with digital RRC synthesis , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference - (ISSCC).

[8]  Oleksiy Klymenko,et al.  An impulse radio UWB transceiver with high-precision TOA measurement unit , 2010, 2010 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation.

[9]  Michelangelo Masini,et al.  A 6 bit and a 7 bit 80 MS/s SAR ADC for an IR-UWB receiver , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Microwaves, Communications, Antennas and Electronic Systems (COMCAS 2011).

[10]  D.A. Hodges,et al.  All-MOS charge-redistribution analog-to-digital conversion techniques. II , 1975, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[11]  Feng-Jung Huang,et al.  A 2.4-GHz single-pole double-throw T/R switch with 0.8-dB insertion loss implemented in a CMOS process , 2001, Proceedings of the 27th European Solid-State Circuits Conference.

[12]  Saurabh Sinha.  Design of an integrated CMOS PLL frequency synthesizer , 2002, 11th IEEE Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (IEEE Cat. No.02CH37379).

[13]  Oleksiy Klymenko,et al.  An Ultra Low-Power 7th order active-RC LPF for IEEE 802.15.4a standard compliant transceiver , 2011, 2011 7th Conference on Ph.D. Research in Microelectronics and Electronics.

[14]  Denys I. Martynenko,et al.  Fully differential baseband pulse generator for IEEE 802.15.4a standard , 2011, 2011 IEEE EUROCON - International Conference on Computer as a Tool.

[15]  Ron Mancini,et al.  Op Amps for Everyone , 2003 .

[16]  T. Manku,et al.  A charge-injection method for Gilbert cell biasing , 1998, Conference Proceedings. IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (Cat. No.98TH8341).

[17]  W. Rhee,et al.  Design of high-performance CMOS charge pumps in phase-locked loops , 1999, ISCAS'99. Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems VLSI (Cat. No.99CH36349).

[18]  G. Fischer,et al.  A high band non-coherent impulse radio UWB receiver , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband.

[19]  J. Scheytt,et al.  High-speed comparators for SAR ADCs in 130 nm BiCMOS , 2010, 6th Conference on Ph.D. Research in Microelectronics & Electronics.

[20]  S. Olonbayar,et al.  Synchronisation performance of wireless sensor networks , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband.

[21]  Oleksiy Klymenko,et al.  An UWB receiver front-end for low data rate Wireless Personal Area Networks , 2009, 2009 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Workshop on Wireless Sensing, Local Positioning, and RFID.