A 2.5 Gpulse/s, 25 pJ/pulse, 0.18μm CMOS Impulse Radio UWB Transmitter Based on Dual-Polarity Distributed Waveform Generator

In this paper, we present a fully-integrated impulse radio UWB transmitter based on a newly-developed ultrafast pulse circuit technique, distributed waveform generator (DWG). A DWG time-interleaves multiple digital pulse generators, and then combines all generated pulses using a wideband on-chip transmission line. A DWG is low power and fully reconfigurable compared to other UWB pulse generation and shaping solutions. It also facilitates the implementation of digital modulation schemes such as on-off keying (OOK) and pulse position modulation (PPM) in the transmitter. A chip prototype with a 10-tap, 10 GS/s dual-polarity DWG was designed and implemented in 0.18 mum standard digital CMOS. The transmitter´s pulse rate can be varied from 16 MHz to 2.5 GHz with an energy efficiency of 25 pj/pulse. The transmitted pulses with OOK and PPM modulation are successfully demonstrated using 32 Mb/s PRBS data.