UWB Receiver Design and Two-Way-Ranging Simulation using VHDL-AMS

Ultra-wide band (UWB) impulse radio systems are appealing in location aware applications because of the high resolution of the measurement of pulses time-of-flight (TOF). This paper describes a complete UWB receiver for indoor localization based on the non-coherent energy detection approach, and the simulation of a two-way-ranging (TWR) time-of-arrival (TOA) scheme between two transceivers. This is done with the aid of the design flow provided by the ADVanceMS simulator and the VHDL-AMS modeling language. The tool is suitable for every application aimed at the integration of mixed-signal systems on chips (SoC) allowing successive refinement steps starting from the VHDL-AMS models of the analog front-end and going down to their equivalent Spice/Spice-RF models. The complete VHDL/VHDL-AMS receiver model is described and, in order to validate the simulation tool, preliminary results obtained with the Alt. PHY UWB 802.15.3 indoor channel model are presented