A 0.18μm CMOS 802.15.4a UWB transceiver for communication and localization

Recently, IEEE 802.15.4a has specified a UWB PHY for low-rate commutation with ranging capability for wireless personnel area and sensor network applications [1]. Related work is reported on low-rate energy-efficient UWB radios [2-4]. However, they are not fully standard compliant or localization enabled. 802.15.4a supports three bands of operation, i.e., sub-1GHz band (249.6 to 749.6MHz), low band (3.1 to 4.8GHz) and high band (6.0 to 10.6GHz) with 16 channels in total. A combination of the burst position modulation (BPM) and binary phase shift keying (BPSK) is adopted. With different coding rate, bursts per symbol, and chips per burst, the mean pulse repetition rate (PRF) could vary from 3.9 to 62.4MHz for data throughput of 120kHz to 31.2MHz. This work presents an UWB RF transceiver which supports 12 channels, variable date rate, and ranging capability as specified in IEEE802.15.4a. Published version