A Quadrature Pulse Generator for Short-Range UWB Vehicular Radar Applications Using a Pulsed Oscillator and a Variable Attenuator

A new quadrature tunable pulse generator is presented in this paper using 0.13 μm CMOS for 22-29 GHz ultrawideband (UWB) vehicular radar. A quadrature inductor-capacitor (LC) oscillator is quickly switched on and off for the duration of the pulse, and the amplitude envelope is modulated with an impulse using a variable passive CMOS attenuator. The impulse is realized using a glitch generator (CMOS nand gate) and its duration can be changed over a wide range (375 ps to more than 1 ns). The switching technique used in the quadrature oscillator creates a large initial voltage for fast startup (0.5 ns) and locks the initial phase of the oscillations to the input clock for pulse coherence. The measured phase noise thus matches that of the clock signal, with a relatively low phase noise of -70 dBc/Hz and -100 dBc/Hz at 1kHz and 1 MHz offsets respectively. The entire circuit operates in switched-mode with a low average power consumption of less than 2.2 mW and 14.8 mW at 50 MHz and 600 MHz pulse repetition frequencies, or below 11 pJ of energy for each of the four differential quadrature pulses. It occupies an active area of less than 0.41 mm² .