A Transceiver Front-End for Ultra-Wide-Band Applications

An integrated pulse based ultra-wide-band (UWB) transceiver front-end is presented in this paper. The pulse generator produces Gaussian modulated pulses satisfying Federal Communication Commission spectral mask with possibility for binary-phase shift keying modulation. The generated pulses have a bandwidth of 2 GHz from 3.1 to 5.1 GHz. The receiver front-end consists of an UWB low-noise amplifier (LNA). The transmit and receive paths are chosen by a transmit/receive (T/R) switch. The pulse generator, T/R switch and the LNA are integrated on a single chip and fabricated using 0.25-mum SiGe:C BiCMOS technology. The integrated circuit components are designed fully differential. The off-chip antenna and bandpass filter are single ended and connected to the T/R switch through a hybrid coupler