A Low-Power UWB-IR Transmitter by Tapered Nonlinear Transmission Lines

We present a low-power transmitter for the ultra-wide-band impulse radio utilizing tapered nonlinear transmission line (NLTL) designs. As the energy in each pulse scales with the inverse of frequency, the tapered NLTL achieves up to 40% energy improvement over a uniform NLTL transmitter. We fabricated three 10 GHz transmitters with different tapering factors in 0.13
$\mu$
m RF-CMOS technology and demonstrated 15 pJ of energy consumption per pulse.