A CMOS impulse generator for UWB wireless communication systems

A fully integrated CMOS impulse generator was designed as a part of the System-on-Chip (SOC) implementation of an Ultra-Wide-Bandwidth (UWB) wireless communication system. Three interpolation delay blocks in series and an XOR block are utilized for the pulse generation. The Gaussian Mono-pulse is generated with a RLC Band-Pass Filter (BPF), and a substrate RF inductor is utilized to avoid using off-chip components. The ideal BPF and the substrate BPF simulation results were compared to predict the actual performance of the impulse generator. The substrate BPF brings wider -3 dB bandwidth (BW), less ripple ratio, and smaller output amplitude. It operates with a center frequency of 3.27 GHz and a -3 dB BW of 3.34 GHz with an inductor value of 10 nH. The impulse generator was designed with MOS current mode logic (MCML) in the TSMC 0.18 μm CMOS process.