An ultrawideband system architecture for tag based wireless sensor networks

With the latest improvements in device size, power consumption, and communications, sensor networks are becoming increasingly more popular. There has also been a great increase in the popularity of commercial applications based on ultrawideband (UWB). Impulse radio (IR) based UWB technology utilizes noise-like signal, has potentially low complexity and low cost, is resistant to severe multipath, and has very good time domain resolution allowing for location and tracking applications. In this paper, the architecture and performance of a noncoherent low complexity UWB impulse radio based transceiver designed for low data rate, low cost sensor network applications is presented. The UWB-IR transmitter is based on a delay locked loop (DLL) and UWB monocycle pulse generator. The UWB-IR receiver utilises a noncoherent, energy detection based approach, which makes it largely independent of the shape of the transmit waveform and robust to multipath channels. The test circuits are designed for 0.35 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. This paper presents system simulations results as well as the performance of key functional blocks of the designed UWB application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) transceiver architecture. The simulated power consumption of UWB-IR transceiver circuits is 136 mW with 100% duty cycle with a 3.3 V power supply.