A CMOS wireless transceiver operating in the 14-18 GHz range is proposed. The receiver uses direct conversion architecture for demodulation with a fast carrier and symbol timing recovery scheme. The transmitter uses a PLL and an up-conversion mixer to generate BPSK modulated signal. A ring oscillator is used in the PLL to make faster switching for burst transmission obtaining high speed low power operation. The transceiver operation has been verified by system simulation while the transmitter test-chip was fabricated in 65 nm CMOS technology and verified with measured results. The transmitter generates a bi-phase modulated signal with a center frequency of 16 GHz at a maximum data rate of 4 Gb/s and consumes 61 mW of power. To the best knowledge of authors, this is lowest power consumption among the reported transmitters that operate over 1 Gb/s range. The transceiver is proposed for a target communication distance of 10 cm.

A novel bandpass filter (BPF) for an ultra-wideband (UWB) system is proposed in this letter. The BPF consists of four coplanar stripline (CPS)-to-microstrip transitions. Each transition is employed for broad electromagnetic (EM) coupling between a short-circuited CPS and an open-circuited microstrip line. The equivalent circuit model of the proposed geometry is derived and utilized in the impedance and mode matching analysis. Measured results show good agreement with the analysis and simulated ones.

This paper describes the characteristic of negative group delay (NGD) circuits for various configurations including first-order, distributed, and second-order RC circuit configurations. This study includes locus, magnitude, and phase characteristics of the NGD circuits. The simplest NGD circuit is available using first-order RC or RL configuration. As an example of distributed circuit configuration, it is verified that losses in a distributed line causes NGD characteristic at higher cut-off band of a coupled four-line bandpass filter. Also, novel wideband NGD circuits using second-order RC configuration, instead of conventional RLC configuration, are proposed. Adding a parallel resistor to a parallel-T filter enables NGD characteristic to it. Also, a Wien-Robinson bridge is modified to have NGD characteristic by controlling the voltage division ratio. They are fabricated on MMIC substrate, and their NGD characteristics are verified with measured results. They have larger insertion loss than multi-stage RLC NGD circuits, however they can realize second-order NGD characteristic without practical implementation of inductors.

This paper proposes an ultra-wideband double-directional spatio-temporal channel sounding technique using transformation between frequency- and time-domain (FD and TD) signals. Virtual antenna arrays, composed of omnidirectional antennas and scanners, are used for transmission and reception in the FD. After Fourier transforming the received FD signals to TD ones, time of arrival (TOA) is estimated using a peak search over the TD signals, and then angle of arrivals (AOA) and angle of departure (AOD) are estimated using a weighted angle histogram with a multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm applied to the FD signals, inverse-Fourier transformed from the TD signals divided into subregions. Indoor channel sounding results validated that an appropriate weighting reduced a spurious level in the angle histogram by a factor of 0.1 to 0.2 in comparison with that of non-weighting. The proposed technique successfully resolved dominant multipath components, including a direct path, a single reflection, and a single diffraction, in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS environments. Joint TOA and AOA/AOD spectra were also derived from the sounding signals. The spectra illustrated the dominant multipath components (agreed with the prediction by ray tracing) as clusters.

The performance of ultra-wideband (UWB) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) receiver based on the RAKE maximal ratio combiner (MRC) followed by a zero forcing (ZF) detector is analytically examined. For a UWB MIMO system with NT transmit antennas, NR receive antennas, and L resolvable multipath components, the proposed MIMO detection scheme is shown to have the diversity order of LNR-NT+1 and its analytical error rate expression is presented in a log-normal fading channel. We also compare the analytical BERs with the simulated results.

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.

This paper is concerned with timing synchronization of high rates UWB signals operating in a dense multipath environment, where access must tackle inter-frame interference (IFI), inter-symbol interference (ISI) and even multi-user interference (MUI). A training-based joint timing and channel estimation scheme is proposed, which is resilient to IFI, ISI, MUI and pulse distortion. A low-complexity detection scheme similar to transmit-reference (TR) scheme comes out as a by-product. For saving the training symbols, we further develop an extended decision-directed (DD) scheme. A lower bound on the probability of correct detection is derived which agrees well with the simulated result for moderate to high SNR values. The results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a significant performance gain in terms of mean square error and bit error rate in comparison to the "timing with dirty templates" (TDT) algorithms.

Exact bit error probabilities (BEP) are derived in closed-form for binary pulsed direct sequence (DS-) and hybrid direct sequence time hopping code division multiple access (DS/TH-CDMA) systems that have potential applications in ultra-wideband (UWB) communications. Flat Nakagami fading channel is considered and the characteristic function (CF) method is adopted. An exact expression of the CF is obtained through a straightforward method, which is simple and good for any arbitrary pulse shape. The CF is then used to obtain the exact BEP that requires less computational complexity than the method based on improved Gaussian approximation (IGA). It is shown under identical operating conditions that the shape of the CF, as well as, the BEP differs considerably for the two systems. While both the systems perform comparably in heavily faded channel, the hybrid system shows better BEP performance in lightly-faded channel. The CF and BEP also strongly depend on chip length and chip-duty that constitute the processing gain (PG). Different combinations of the parameters may result into the same PG and the BEP of a particular system for a constant PG, though remains nearly constant in a highly faded channel, may vary substantially in lightly-faded channel. A comparison of the results from the exact method with those from the standard Gaussian approximation (SGA) reveals that the SGA, though accurate for both the systems in highly-faded channel, becomes extremely optimistic for low-duty systems in lightly-faded channel. The SGA also fails to track several other system trade-offs.

This paper presents the analysis of in-band interference caused by pulse-based ultra-wideband (UWB) systems. The analysis contains both plain Impulse Radio UWB (IR-UWB) and Transmitted Reference UWB (TR-UWB) systems as a source of interference. The supposed victim is a narrowband BPSK system with a band-pass filter. The effect of pulse-based UWB systems is analyzed in terms of bit error rate. The analysis is given in terms of the specific combinations of pulse repetition frequency and center frequency of the narrowband bandpass filter. In those situations, the UWB interference cannot be modeled as a Gaussian noise. It also manifests situations in which the victim is under the severest or the slightest interference from TR-UWB. According to its result, the analysis is validated via simulation.

Multipath energy capture and inter-symbol interference (ISI) are two intractable problems in high-data-rate Ultra-wideband (UWB) systems. To tackle the problems and simplify the receiver, we propose an adaptive interference avoidance scheme based on Pre-RAKE combining technique. The symbol repetition period (SRP) is regarded a changeable parameter in an ordered set to avoid severe interference paths and guarantee high data-rate. The set is known to both the transmitter and receiver. The index of the selected SRP is then sent to the receiver to coordinate the transmitter and receiver. The SRP can be updated adaptively according to the variations of the channels. Both theoretical analysis and simulations show that the ISI is mitigated and the transmission rate is improved simultaneously compared to the constant SRP transmission scheme.

A multiple-antenna receiving and combining scheme is proposed for high-data-rate transmitted-reference (TR) Ultra-Wideband (UWB) systems. The nonlinearity of the inter-symbol interference (ISI) model is alleviated via simple antenna combining. Under the simplified ISI model, frequency domain equalization (FDE) is adopted and greatly reduces the complexity of the equalizer. A simple estimation algorithm for the simplified ISI model is presented. Simulation results demonstrate that compared to the single receive antenna scheme, the proposed method can obtain a significant diversity gain and eliminate the BER floor effect. Moreover, compared to the complex second-order time domain equalizer, FDE showed better performance robustness in the case of imperfect model estimation.

This letter presents the performance of ultra-wideband multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (UWB MB-OFDM) systems with an extra diversity. To fully obtain diversity gain in the current MB-OFDM system when a time-domain spreading (TDS) is adopted, two consecutive OFDM symbols are designed to be cyclic shifted against each other. Simulation results indicate that the MB-OFDM system using additional frequency diversity outperforms conventional MB-OFDM system.

Impulse ultra-wideband (UWB) is an attractive technology for large ad hoc sensor networks due to its precise ranging capacity, multi-path fading robustness and low radiation power. The transient and carrier-less nature of low radiation pulse and harsh multipath channel condition makes it cumbersome to implement carrier sensing. We proposed clear channel assessment (CCA) based on preamble-assisted modulation (PAM) for UWB sensor networks. Preamble symbols are periodically inserted into the frame payload in the time domain to serve as regular feature for reliable CCA. We simulated the CCA performance in the multipath UWB channel model developed by IEEE 802.15.4a. PAM and CCA configurations were optimized for the distributed carrier sense multiple access protocol. PAM was accepted by 802.15.4a group as an optional feature. Furthermore, the multiplexed preamble symbols can be exploited for channel estimation to improve communication and ranging.

Analytical expressions based on the Gauss-Chebyshev quadrature (GCQ) rule technique are derived to evaluate the bit-error rate (BER) for the time-hopping pulse position modulation (TH-PPM) ultra-wide band (UWB) systems under a Nakagami-m fading channel. The analyses are validated by the simulation results and adopted to assess the accuracy of the commonly used Gaussian approximation (GA) method. The influence of the fading severity on the BER performance of TH-PPM UWB system is investigated.

In this paper, the effects of Bragg scattering on ultra-wideband (UWB) signal transmission from periodic surfaces are reported. First, the frequency dispersive property of Bragg scattering is theoretically and experimentally confirmed. Next, the transfer function of both specular path and Bragg scattering are extracted. Then direct sequence UWB (DS-UWB) transmission simulations are conducted by using a raised cosine pulse that occupied 3.1 to 10.6 GHz and a Gaussian pulse that occupied 8.75 to 9.25 GHz. Finally, the effects of Bragg scattering on UWB systems are discussed.

The problem of estimating the timing of ultra-wide band signal is considered in the letter. We develop a maximum likelihood timing estimation algorithm for binary PAM DS-UWB systems. The derivation of the proposed algorithm is based on the known training sequence and AWGN channel. The Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB) for the ML timing estimator is presented as a performance benchmark. It is found via numerical results that the ML timing estimator on AWGN channels achieves the CRB when the values of Eb/N0 for the observation bits Nb=50 are sufficiently high. Finally, the performance of the proposed ML estimator is evaluated on actual channels with intersymbol interference such as an IEEE UWB indoor multipath channel model.

Cognitive Radios (CR) can recognize the communication environment and switch its communication scheme to more efficiently and flexibly utilize the radio spectrum. The performance of ultra wideband (UWB) degrades if interference is not suppressed properly. We propose here a series of adaptive chirp waveforms in UWB systems. By designing waveform shaping of both linear chirp and non-linear cases, we avoid the estimated spectrum of the on-going applications without the necessity of notch filters, and thus reduce the system complexity. We evaluate system performance of the proposed scheme by simulations and verify that the proposed scheme is a candidate for cognitive UWB systems.

This paper presents an ultra wideband (UWB) channel sounding scheme with a technique for estimating time of arrival (TOA) and angle of arrival (AOA) using measurement signals. Since the power spectrum over the UWB bandwidth can be measured in advance, we propose a signal model using the measurement power spectrum to design the proper UWB signals model. This signal model is more similar to measurement signals than the flat spectrum model which is an ideal model. If more than three waves impinge on a receiver, we must determine the proper grouping of the elements of TOA vector and AOA vector. It is difficult to determine the grouping using only measurement signals because of many degradation factors. We also propose pairing the elements of TOA vector and that of AOA vector using correlation method based on measurement signals and the proposed signal model. This technique is available for more than the case of three paths if pairing the estimated TOAs and AOAs of measurement signals is not accurately determined. We evaluated the proposed techniques for a vector network analyzer (VNA) with a three-dimensional virtual antenna array.

We present a low-cost UWB-based radiolocation system complying with the IEEE 802.15.4a specifications. To significantly reduce the required analog-to-digital converter speed, we employ the sampling down conversion technique. The matching pursuit algorithm combined with a lost sample restoration algorithm is derived for the UWB time of arrival (TOA) estimation. The simulation results of the proposed algorithm show that the TOA estimation accuracy approaches the multipath resolution under the NLOS channel.

This letter proposes a sliding window method with iterative tuning for channel estimation of UWB signals. The iterative tuning scheme, which is based on multiple iterations of least mean square (LMS) algorithm, is utilized for modifying the output of the conventional sliding window channel estimator. By using this, the proposed method is more flexible due to the tradeoff between the processing time and accuracy, which makes it more suitable for practical UWB wireless communications. Simulations are also provided for demonstrating the validation of the proposed method.