A low-power mixing DAC IR-UWB-receiver

This paper introduces a novel receiver architecture for low-power IR-UWB receivers in the 3.75–4.25GHz band. The receiver correlates the incoming pulse with an approximated pulse template in the analog domain. The template is learnt digitally and transferred to the analog domain via a low resolution DAC. The paper presents the design of the mixing DAC that implements the downconverter, DAC and correlator which consumes only 875uW in 90nm CMOS technology. The DAC receiver topology requires 4dB less energy per incoming bit in comparison with current state-of-the-art IR-UWB receivers.