A continuous-time IR-UWB RAKE receiver for coherent symbol detection

Impulse radio ultra-wide band (IR-UWB) technology has been an interesting area of research for low power short-range applications. Due to wide bandwidth, RAKE based receivers are preferred over other type of receivers. However, designing RAKE based correlating receivers remains quite challenging. Correlating receivers in digital domain are very power consuming due to the high-speed DSPs, ADC and matched filter. Synchronization is another issue. Hence we get rid of these power hungry blocks in the presented correlating RAKE receiver which does coherent symbol detection in continuous-time without the need for synchronized clocks. A IR-UWB RAKE receiver in continuous-time binary value (CTBV) overcoming some of the fundamental issues of the conventional correlating receiver is presented along with the measured results. The IR-UWB RAKE receiver along with the sampler, symbol generator and ranging block can be used as a high-precision ranging and communication transceiver for biomedical applications.