Asynchronous communication for wireless sensors using ultra wideband impulse radio

This paper addresses simulations and design of an asynchronous integrated ultra wideband impulse radio transmitter and receiver suitable for low-power miniaturized wireless sensors. This paper first presents software simulations for asynchronous transmission over noisy channels using FSK-OOK modulation, which demonstrates that the proposed architecture is capable to communicate reliably at moderate signal-to-noise ratios and that the main errors are due to deletions of received noisy transmit pulses. Then, we address a hardware chip implementation of the integrated UWB transmitter and receiver, which is fabricated using an IBM 0.18µm CMOS process. This implementation provides a low peak power consumption, i.e., 10.8 mW for the transmitter and 5.4 mW for the receiver, respectively. The measured maximum baseband data rate of the proposed radio is 2.3 Mb/s.