Crystal-less duty-cycled-when-active IR-UWB transceivers

Abstract

The short time duration of IR-UWB signals offer unique opportunities for bit-level duty-cycling when-active that is not possible with radios based on traditional modulation techniques, which must be duty-cycled at a coarser scale. We save substantial power by turning on the transceiver only when needed both in transmission and in reception. We leverage this simple-sounding concept in a custom IR-UWB based physical layer specification that eliminates the need for precise frequency matching through well-matched external crystals. We demonstrate that our methods are compatible with traditional packet-based networking schemes by implementing a FPGA based baseband and MAC layer.