A low power impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) receiver for DC-960 MHz band is proposed in this paper. The proposed receiver employs multiple DC power-free charge-domain sampling correlators to eliminate the need for phase synchronization. To alleviate BER degradation due to an increased charge injection in a subtraction operation in the sampling correlator than that of an addition operation, a comparator with variable threshold (=offset) voltage is used, which enables an addition-only operation. The developed receiver fabricated in 1.2 V 65 nm CMOS achieves the lowest energy consumption of 17.6 pJ/bit at 100 Mbps in state-of-the-art correlation-based UWB receivers.

A novel DC-to-960 MHz impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transceiver based on threshold detection technique is developed. It features a digital pulse-shaping transmitter, a DC power-free pulse discriminator and an error-recovery phase-frequency detector. The developed transceiver in 90 nm CMOS achieves the lowest energy consumption of 2.2 pJ/bit transmitter and 1.9 pJ/bit receiver at 100 Mbps in the UWB transceivers.