Multi-channel and multi-data rate IR-UWB single-chip transceiver compliant to IEEE 802.15.4a

This paper describes a monolithic integrated single-chip transceiver intended for impulse radio (IR) - Ultra-wide Band (UWB) applications compliant to the IEEE 802.15.4a standard. The transceiver operates in the higher UWB band on four different channels, which fit into the European spectral mask (defined by the ECC). In accordance to the standard, several data rates up to 27.24 MB/sec have been implemented including the nominal data rate of 850 kb/sec. The presented chip consists of the entire RF-front-end, an analogue baseband implementation with about 250 MHz signal bandwidth, a corresponding analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue conversion clocked with 499.2 MHz, and the baseband processor running with a clock of 31.2 MHz. In order to achieve full multi-channel and multi-data rate flexibility the impulse generation is based on the gated oscillator principle allowing required on-off keying (OOK) as well as binary phase shift keying (BPSK). The receiver basically follows the direct down-conversion approach including IQ separation to support coherent impulse detection. The integrated baseband processor controls the analogue and RF part, performs pre- and post-processing of the received and transmitted data, and provides a serial peripheral interface (SPI) for data exchange with an external micro controller. The presented chip was fabricated in a 0.25 μm SiGe:C BiCMOS technology occupying a Si area of 3.65 × 3.65 mm².