Largely reconfigurable impulse radio UWB transceiver

A new and efficient digital baseband architecture for impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transceivers with reconfigurable capacities for wireless sensor network applications is presented. An implementation has been made on FPGA for validation by measurements. It is believed to achieve the highest data rate and the largest number of operating modes for an IR-UWB reconfigurable transceiver. Measurements demonstrate reconfigurability in data rate (from 4 to 125 Mbits/s), chip duration (from 8 to 32 ns), pulse duration (from 1 to 4 ns), bit duration (from 8 to 256 ns), processing gain (from 1 to 8 pulses/bit), occupied bandwidth, radio range, BER performance, synchronisation accuracy (from 0.5 to 4 ns), pulse amplitude, transmitted power density, duty cycle (from 3 to 50 ), power consumption, spectrum occupation, and maximum supported UWB channel delay spread (from 4 to 31 ns).