Performance degradation due to low resolution ADC in IR-UWB systems

This paper addresses the issue of performance degradation of IR-UWB systems in presence of low resolution ADC. This is a part of a UWB Transceiver working at W-band in Line-of-Sight, so effects of multipath can be ignored. First of all, the paper derives the analytical expression of the BER of an IR-UWB system as a function of the number of quantization bits of the ADC. This model has been used to compare the performance of the IR-UWB system with a BPSK system in presence of low resolutions ADC. The comparison has shown that even if BPSK is less sensitive to the ADC resolution, IR-UWB needs a lower number of bits to get performance close to the ideal ones.