Interference and Distortion in Pulsed Ultra Wideband Receivers

In this paper the effects of narrowband interferer signals on a pulsed ultra wideband (UWB) receiver are determined. Starting from the EIRP limits imposed by the FCC, the link budget of an UWB transceiver system in the 0-960 MHz UWB band is examined and illustrated with numerical examples. The influence of nonlinearities in the analog receiver front end and their impact on the receiver performance are pointed out. Simulations show that the application of a low noise amplifier (LNA) is not beneficial in moderate to high inferferer environments. Moreover, the LNA will reduce the error performance in such situations. It is the goal of this work to determine at which interferer levels the LNA should be removed from the receiver chain. The correlator circuit introduced in this work is designed to withstand such extreme interferer conditions, which is proven by measurement results