Design considerations and effect of manufacturing process variations on UWB transceiver specifications

The emergence of ultra-wideband (UWB) standard for short-range communications (cable replacement in home/office environment) has drawn significant attention from the semiconductor industry. Due to the wide band of operation, designing and manufacturing efficient/cost-effective UWB devices while maintaining a tight bound on the specifications is a tough challenge. Although present day designers have access to very mature manufacturing processes (0.13 μm), unless compensated otherwise, the inherent variations in the manufacturing process parameters can set the specifications off beyond the designed limits. This paper studies the effect of inherent process variations due to manufacturing and design choices on transceiver specifications (EVM and BER). Studies presented in this paper show that these variations can cause significant degradation in overall system performance.