Low power IR-UWB pulse generator in 0.18μm CMOS technology

A new method of impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) pulse generation is investigated in this paper. Low power pulse generator is composed of a glitch generator, a pulse oscillator, and a pulse shaping filter. The circuit presented was designed in a 0.18μm UMC CMOS technology. Since the impulse radio-based generator operates in burst mode with low duty cycle it has very low power consumption of 1.64 mW. This corresponds to energy consumption of 16.4 pJ per pulse considering 200 MHz pulse repetition frequency. Post-layout simulation results showed spectrum that fully complies with the corresponding FCC spectral mask. It has -10 dBm bandwidth of 5.7 GHz from 4.9 GHz to 10.6 GHz. The peak-to-peak amplitude was 180 mV on 50 Ω output load. The core design has size of 0.2 mm
²
. The pulse generator has been evaluated for the best performance supporting on-off keying modulation.