A Low-Power Template Generator for Coherent Impulse-Radio Ultra Wide-Band Receivers

In this paper, a template generator circuit for impulse-radio (IR) ultra wide-band (UWB) receivers is presented. The circuit is implemented in a 0.18 mum CMOS process. It is capable of generating a differential template signal having a four cycles long square waveform for both rising and falling edges of the input triggering signal. The template waveform cycle time is 125 ps. This allows the detection of UWB pulses whose energy is centered around 8 GHz. The unloaded peak-to-peak amplitude of the generated template waveform is 550 mV, and it is reduced to 230 mV when connected to a passive mixer. The average power consumption is 2.0 mW for a pulse repetition frequency (PRF) of 200 MHz. The presented template generator can be easily adapted to maximize the SNR for arbitrary received pulses