A Fully-Integrated, Short-Range, Low Data Rate FM-UWB Transmitter in 90 nm CMOS

This paper presents a fully-integrated 3-5 GHz-band FM-UWB transmitter implemented in 90 nm bulk CMOS. The front-end consists of an RF current-controlled oscillator (RF-ICO) and class-AB power amplifier. Transmit data modulates a sub-carrier oscillator. The 2-FSK modulated output is amplified by a transconductor, and directly modulates the RF-ICO tune input. A successive approximation register (SAR) algorithm and on-chip all-digital frequency-locked loop (FLL) calibrate the carrier and sub-carrier frequencies. All voltage and current references required by the transmitter are included on-chip. The 0.2 × 0.5 mm
²
active area transmitter consumes 900 μW from a 1 V supply. Energy efficiency of the transmitter is 9 nJ/bit running continuously at 100 kbits/s.