Co-design of ESD protection and UWB RF front-end ICs.

This paper discusses critical aspects for co-design of ultra wideband (UWB) system-on-chip (SoC) and on-chip electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection, which are beyond the considerations on data rate and bandwidth. Impulse radio UWB system architecture has been defined with critical building blocks proposed and verified, including pulse generator, transmitter, low noise amplifier (LNA) and multiplier based correlator. ESD protection is well considered for each related block. Design examples have been implemented in a commercial RFCMOS processes to demonstrate the working principles for key UWB transmitter and receiver circuit blocks. UWB-ESD co-design techniques, simulation and measurement results for these UWB RF modules are presented in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]