Low-Power Digital Baseband Transceiver Design for UWB Physical Layer of IEEE 802.15.6 Standard

This paper presents the design and implementation of ultrawideband digital baseband transceiver for wireless body area networks (WBAN) applications. The power dissipation and area of the proposed architecture are minimized by combining algorithmic and architectural level modifications. A new algorithm for Bose-Chaudhuri- Hocquenghem (BCH) encoding is implemented and the coding gain of the BCH decoder is improved by 0.5 dB, with a cost of only one percent area overhead. An area efficient, low-complexity, and low-power BCH decoder is implemented and it has 42% lower area and 38% lower power dissipation compared to a conventional hard-decision decoder. Other salient features of this paper include a low-complexity, low-power packet detection unit, and a low-power module for removing the shortening bits. The baseband transceiver has been designed in 90 nm CMOS technology and it has an energy efficiency of 73 pJ/bit in transmitter mode and 225 pJ/bit in receiver mode.