A Reconfigurable, 130 nm CMOS 108 pJ/pulse, Fully Integrated IR-UWB Receiver for Communication and Precise Ranging

This paper presents a fully integrated flexible ultra-low power UWB impulse radio receiver, capable of cm-accurate ranging. Ultra-low-power consumption is achieved by employing the quadrature analog correlating receiver architecture, by exploiting the duty-cycled nature of the system, by operating in the sub-1 GHz band as well as by careful circuit design. Two pulse rates, 39.0625 Mpulses per second (Mpps) and 19.531 Mpps, and a wide range of processing gains (0-18 dB) are supported. Also, the acquisition algorithm and accuracy can be adapted at run time. This flexible implementation allows to dynamically trade power consumption for performance depending on the operating conditions and the application requirements. The receiver prototype was manufactured in 130 nm CMOS and the active circuit area measures 4.52 mm². The IC contains a complete analog front-end, digital backend and implements the algorithms necessary for acquisition, synchronization, data reception and ranging. Consuming 4.2 mW when operating at 39.0625 Mpps, it achieves an energy efficiency of 108 pJ/pulse. A 1.3 Mb/s wireless link over more than 10 m in an office-like environment has been demonstrated under direct line-of-sight (LOS) conditions with a raw packet-error-rate (PER) less than 10% and cm-accurate ranging.