A 65nm CMOS inductorless triple-band-group WiMedia UWB PHY

Ultra-wideband (UWB) is an emerging broadband wireless technology enabling data rates up to 480Mb/s. To allow world-wide operability the WiMedia Alliance addresses three frequency band groups (BGs): BG1 (3168-4752MHZ), BG3 (6336-7920MHz) and BG6 (7392-8976MHz). With an application as wireless USB, highly integrated all-CMOS SoCs offer competitive advantages over less integrated approaches. Here we present a fully integrated single-die PHY covering the three BGs and realized in 65nm CMOS. The PHY is compliant with WiMedia v1.2. The circuits are completely inductorless, even though the LO generation as well as other RF circuits need to operate up to almost 9GHz. This feature reduces unwanted coupling mechanisms which may lead to system performance degradation. Furthermore, one single RF signal path is used to cover all three BGs in TX and RXmode.