An efficient threshold setting algorithm for digital ultra wideband communication systems

The extremely narrow pulses which characterize ultra wideband communications surface as a major bottleneck in designing such systems for short range applications primarily due to power hungry gigahertz clocks at the receiver. This paper presents an alternative scheme of designing the ultra wideband receiver, one which obviates the use of high frequency clocks. A receiver architecture based on a variable threshold detector is proposed, together with an easily implementable threshold setting algorithm to improve the detector performance such that it asymptotically meets that of conventional schemes while consuming significantly less power.