A Low-Complexity Synchronizer for OFDM-Based UWB System

In current ultra-wideband (UWB) baseband synchronizer approaches, the parallel architecture is used to achieve over 500 MSamples/s throughput requirement. Therefore achieving low power and less area becomes the challenge of UWB baseband design. In this paper, a low-complexity synchronizer combining data-partition-based correlation algorithms and dynamic-threshold design is proposed for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing based UWB system. It provides a methodology to reduce design complexity with an acceptable performance loss. Based on the data-partition algorithms, both single auto-correlator and moving-average-free matched filter are developed with 528 Msample/s throughput for the 480 Mb/s UWB design. Simulation results show the synchronization loss can be limited to 0.8-dB signal-to-noise ratio for 8% system packet-error rate