A small area 2.8pJ/pulse 7th derivative Gaussian pulse generator for IR-UWB

This paper presents an UWB pulse transmitter design using 0.35μm CMOS process. A 7^th order derivative Gaussian pulse is generated using a Phase Detector (PD), which consists of four D-Latches and a pulse shaping stage to generated 5^th order pulse, and at the output a 2nd order derivative RLC using a cross inductor is added. An interesting feature of these inductors is that it consumes a small area of 140×160μm², while the traditional square planar inductor would occupy an area of 180×180μm². Thus, the last one needs 45% more area than the cross inductor, so this cross inductor leads to an extra reduction in Silicon area, what is one of the main purposes of this work to get a small UWB transmitter. The whole circuit has been simulated and the results had demonstrated the circuit capability to operate as a pulse generator; the simulations shows ~70mV of pulse amplitude and 650ps of the pulse duration, dynamic energy consumption of around 2.8pJ and an average power consumption of 288μW per pulse respectively at input frequency of 100MHz@3.3V power supply voltage. The complete circuit occupies a very small area of 168×234 μm² (excluding the PADs).