UWB Radio Transceivers For Ultra Low Power and Low Data Rate Communications

Radio transceivers relying on impulsed radio UWB signals show a strong potential for low data rate communications at an ultra low power consumption. They are for instance proposed by the IEEE 802.15.4a low-rate wireless personal area networks standard (LR-WPAN) to support low data rates, low power and low complexity short-range radio communications. In this paper, we give an overview of our recent UWB radio front-end designs along with new system simulation results, and derive specifications for a 15.4a receiver. The system simulations are used to balance the partitioning of gain, noise and distortion for next generation transceivers and allow to analyze the expected communication range of IEEE 802.15.4a systems in various channel conditions. The free-space wireless channel loss as well as 9 propagation scenarios are taken into account.