Area and Power Efficient Ultra-Wideband Transmitter Based on Active Inductor

Abstract

This paper presents the design of an impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transmitter for low-power, shortrange, and high-data rate applications such as high density neural recording interfaces. The IR-UWB transmitter pulses are generated by modulating the output of a local oscillator. The large area requirement of the spiral inductor in a conventional on-chip LC tank is overcome by replacing it with an active inductor topology. The circuit has been fabricated in a UMC CMOS 180 nm technology, with a die area of 0.012 mm 2. The temporal width of the output waveform is determined by a pulse generator based on logic gates. The measured pulse is compliant with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) power spectral density limits and within the frequency band of 3-6 GHz. For the minimum pulse duration of 1 ns, the energy consumption of the design is 20 pJ per bit, while transmitting at a 200 Mbps data rate with an amplitude of 130 mV. Index Terms-Wireless data transmission, low-power, highdata rate, impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transmitter, pulse generation, active inductor.

Ultra‐low power low‐complexity 3–7.5 GHz IR‐UWB transmitter with spectrum tunability

“…Recently reported IR-UWB TXs generate appropriately shaped signal based on (a) delay-based pulse or edge recombination [6,9,12,[24][25][26][27][28], (b) the duty-cycled or switched oscillator [3,14,15,29,30], (c) up-conversion using mixer and frequency synthesis [7,16,18,19,[21][22][23]31], and (d) on-chip filtering solutions [2,32,33]. Although all-digital solutions based on pulse or edge recombination avoid using a mixer or/and an oscillator to enable low power consumption and faster settling time, they still require a pulse shaper (usually band-pass or high-pass filter) to reduce the low-frequency spectrum components and have difficulties in summing or adjusting overlapped delayed pulses demanding complex calibration and programmability features.…”

A Novel Circuit Architecture for Generating Narrow Pulses via Spectrum Stitching

“…It is well known that, the complexity, cost, and power consumption of DACs increase drastically with the increase of sampling rate [9]- [12]. As a more cost-effective approach, numerous pulse generators in literatures take advantage of sharp rising/falling edges to construct narrow pulses [13]- [18]. In contrast to constructing pulses in the time domain, it is possible to synthesize narrow pulses in the frequency domain.…”

“…As proposed in [19], arbitrary pulse waveforms can be synthesized using multiple discrete continuous-wave elements based upon the theory of Fourier series. Compared with the time-domain methods in [13]- [18], the frequencydomain synthesis approach is found more precise and versatile [20]. Synthesizing pulses using multiple continuous-wave elements can be considered the frequency-domain counterpart of DAC: in DAC the pulse is defined one temporal sample by one temporal sample, whereas in frequency-domain synthesis the pulse is defined one spectral sample by one spectral sample.…”

Edge Computing: A Survey On the Hardware Requirements in the Internet of Things World

“…Limited power represents a huge constraint to many components of the architecture, especially the energy-hungry ones, like wireless transmitters. In such a case, communication and data to be broadcast must be reduced to the essential, which translates to low energy technology, such as Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) [3][4][5][6][7][8], and transmit only useful features by exploiting state-of-the-art techniques, like Compressing Sensing.…”