A low-cost COTS UWB transceiver for biological applications achieves 50 Mb/s with < 10−6 Raw BER

This paper describes a low cost approach to designing an impulse radio ultra-wide band (IR-UWB) transceiver for biological applications. It operates in a 3-4 GHz sub-band of the overall 3.1-10.6 GHz UWB frequency band using commercial-of-the-shelf components (COTS) along with custom designed UWB pulse generator, analog filters and matched patch antennas. We demonstrate how COTs components can be used in conjunction with active/passive RF circuits to design a functional UWB system for short range (1 m) and medium data rate applications (25 - 50 Mb/s). A Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA development board is used to generate a pseudorandom bit sequence that is wirelessly transmitted/received and analyzed for Bit Error Rate (BER <; 10^-6). BER is achieved for Tx-Rx distances from 0.3m to 1m through air and pork tissue.