A low-power impulse radio ultra-wideband (IRUWB) transmitter for biomedical sensor applications

In this paper an UWB impulse radio transmitter for a low-power wearable respiration monitoring sensor is proposed. The transmitter operates in the 3.1 to 5 GHz oscillation frequency range with a tunable channel bandwidth of 0.8 - 1.3 GHz. Implemented in a standard 130-nm CMOS process the proposed transmitter follows on-off keying (OOK) modulation scheme and consumes an average power of 8.2 μW with 1.2 V supply voltage. With a data rate of 1 Mbps, the entire system consumes only 82pJ/bit, which makes it suitable for short distance biomedical sensor applications. Simulation results show that the pulse duration and the amplitude of the impulse signal are 1ns and 0.9 V
_pp
, respectively, with a peak emission power spectrum density of -41 dBm/MHz, which fully complies with the FCC spectral mask.