Toward digital UWB radios: part I - frequency domain UWB receiver with 1 bit ADCs

Our UWB receiver, based on the frequency domain approach, samples spectral components of the received signal at the pulse repetition rate, and it effectively increases the sampling rate through digital signal processing in the frequency domain (Lee, H.-J. et al., Proc. IEEE Conf. on Ultra Wideband Systems and Technologies, p.86-90, 2003; Lee and Ha, D.S., Proc. IEEE Comp. Soc. Annual Symp. on VLSI, p.236-7, 2003). We investigate employment of 1 bit ADCs for our UWB receiver and propose to use the confidence levels of the individual line spectrum in the correlation operation. Our simulation results indicate that the performance of our receiver with 1 bit ADCs is degraded by only 3 dB at BER of 10^-1 compared to ideal ADCs and is comparable with a conventional receiver that uses an analog correlator.