1.8 pJ/Pulse Programmable Gaussian Pulse Generator for Full-Band Noncarrier Impulse-UWB Transceivers in 90-nm CMOS

This paper presents a single-chip ultralow power programmable Gaussian pulse generator (PG) designed and implemented in the 90-nm CMOS for 3.1-10.6 GHz full-band impulse-radio ultrawideband (UWB) transmitters. Measurement shows that this novel simple two-inverter-based PG achieves the lowest reported power dissipation of merely 1.8 pJ/pulse with a 100-MHz pulse-repeating frequency at 1-V supply, extremely short and programmable pulsewidth ranging from 150 to 350 ps while covering the full 3.1-10.6 GHz UWB spectrum, and a very small area of 0.0068 mm
²
. It supports up to 6 Gb/s data rate for UWB wireless streaming. A new Federal-CommunicationCommission-aware Gaussian PG design optimization method is discussed and verified experimentally.