Abstract
A single chip transceiver for ultra-wideband (UWB) impulse radio is described in this article. The UWB transmitter implements a low power Gaussian shaping filter to reduce the side lobes in the frequency domain, and a simple pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) is employed to maintain the low power consumption. The proposed architecture features a simple design, low-power operation and enables the pulse-shape generation for a multi-channel UWB radio. A low power UWB receiver was implemented with a pulse detector for the demodulation. This receiver is for the three lower bands of the UWB from 3.1 to 5 GHz. The IC is implemented using a 0.18 mu m RF CMOS technology with a 1.8 V power supply. The total current consumption of the transceiver is 17 mA.