Design of low power CMOS UWB transceiver ICs

ANG CHYUEN WEI

Publication

Design of low power CMOS UWB transceiver ICs

ANG CHYUEN WEI

Abstract

Two non-coherent UWB transceivers for wireless sensor networks are proposed in this thesis, namely the low power burst mode transceiver and the burst mode super regenerative transceiver. Both transceivers have simple architecture and low power consumption. Power consumption can be significantly reduced with gating circuitries to switch on/off the transceiver.<br>The transceiver blocks were implemented in 0.18-um CMOS technology. A low noise amplifier was designed for high gain of over 40 dB to compensate the squarer loss. A squarer with 40 dB conversion gain was designed to capture signal energy. In the limiting amplifier, a cascade of 5 stages with offset cancellation was employed to achieve 60 dB gain with a bandpass characteristic of 288 kHz to 1 GHz. A new super regenerative UWB detector was designed to achieve large gain with minimum circuit blocks through positive feedback. It can achieve rail-to-rail amplification for UWB input of 26 mV peak-to-peak.