Challenges in the Design of an Impulse Radio Based Ultra Wide Band Transceiver

Ultra Wide Band (UWB) is one of the key emerging short-range wireless technology that can answer many of the problems faced by narrow band technologies. UWB offers all the advantages of spread spectrum including GHz of RF bandwidth and high data rate. UWB signals are virtually undetectable operating at noise like low power levels. UWB offers very fine range resolution and also immune to multipath fading. Conventionally UWB is defined as carrier free, impulse based radio, which communicates in time domain by only using sharp rising pulses of the order of fraction of nano seconds. In this paper challenges in the design and development of Impulse Radio based Ultra Wide Band transceiver is explained. Antennas that work in time domain, UWB impulses that meet the required FCC mask on EIRP and digitizer that has to sample and process at the rate of Gigasamples per second are some of the key challenges.