Asynchronous communication for wireless sensors using ultra wideband impulse radio

Abstract

This paper addresses simulations and design of an asynchronous integrated ultra wideband impulse radio transmitter and receiver suitable for low-power miniaturized wireless sensors. This paper first presents software simulations for asynchronous transmission over noisy channels using FSK-OOK modulation, which demonstrates that the proposed architecture is capable to communicate reliably at moderate signal-to-noise ratios and that the main errors are due to deletions of received noisy transmit pulses. Then, we address a hardware chip implementation of the integrated UWB transmitter and receiver, which is fabricated using an IBM 0.18μm CMOS process. This implementation provides a low peak power consumption, i.e., 10.8 mW for the transmitter and 5.4 mW for the receiver, respectively. The measured maximum baseband data rate of the proposed radio is 2.3 Mb/s.