A spatial RAKE-receiver for real-time UWB-IR applications

Ultra wideband systems are hard to implement in standard CMOS technology. In this paper we present a novel spatial RAKE-receiver, exploring mixed-mode circuits for symbol detection and inverter delay lines for synchronization. The receiver is implemented as a RAKE structure combining digital shift registers with analog computation in a series of parallel taps of a synchronizing delay line. In each parallel bit stream the incoming signal is cross-correlated with a stored template. By combining a delay line and a mixed-mode correlator we can explore multipath reflections in a time domain statistical computation for symbol recovery.