A 0.55V 16Mb/s 1.6mW non-coherent IR-UWB digital baseband with ±1ns synchronization accuracy

IR-UWB radios are finding increasing use in low data rate sensing applications, in part because they can be easily duty-cycled to achieve extreme energy efficiency. Within pulsed radios, noncoherent (NC) RF front ends that use simple square-and-integrate samplers offer significant energy-per-bit savings over their coherent counterparts. However, such samplers lose phase information and accumulate squared noise over the integration period. While this increases the SNR required to relay a bit reliably, the greater challenge is achieving signal synchronization. Telemetry applications often have small pay- loads (10 to 100 bits) where synchronization time dominates. Furthermore, synchronization performance is being continually pushed to enable positioning capability. Hence, the ultimate advantage of NC receivers relies on their ability to synchronize efficiently.