Ultra Wide Band receiver design

This paper deals with our Ultra Wide Band (UWB) receiver which is designed for precise indoor localization of fire fighters and members of the rescue teams. The purpose of this indoor positioning system is to search for UWB transmitters in a given area and to determine their position. This article describes not only the hardware design of the UWB receiver but also the FPGA firmware development. The described hardware is also focused on the development of algorithms and creating signal records used during the real positioning system development. The design of our UWB receiver considers many requirements such as wide bandwidth, high ADC sampling rate, high speed digital buses, high speed digital interfaces and being made of low cost parts. The results of our simulations show that UWB receiver we proposed is suitable for this application and the hardware and firmware is able to fulfill our requirements. New functions and new signal processing algorithms can be easily added to the FPGA firmware in the future.