A fully integrated 802.15.4a IR-UWB Transceiver in 0.13µm CMOS with digital RRC synthesis

The 802.15.4a low-rate WPAN standard adopts Impulse-Radio UWB (IR-UWB) to provide a low-power communication system with improved communication range, robustness, and mobility. Furthermore its standardized low-cost and high-accuracy ranging capability encourages many location-aware applications. Propelled by the numerous potential applications, there have been several efforts for its implementation recently [1–3]. However, the design optimization issues including compliance, ranging accuracy and energy-saving techniques remain largely unexplored. This work presents a fully integrated coherent transceiver that supports 3 channels in Band Group 1, 3 to 5GHz, with accurate ranging capability and active power management. The system uses digital root-raised-cosine (RRC) pulse synthesis and RF up/down-conversion, which allows a strict compliance with the standard for both RRC pulse shape and transmit spectrum in the presence of PVT variations.