Abstract The focus of this thesis is Ultra Wideband (UWB) Impulse Radio (UWB-IR) transmitters and non-coherent receivers. The aim of the thesis is to investigate, analyze and design UWB-IR transmitter and receiver structures both from a theoretical and circuit design viewpoint. An UWB-IR transmitter structure is proposed and is the subject of a detailed investigation. The transmitter generates a Gaussian monocycle and can be modified to generate a family of Gaussian waveforms. The Gaussian monocycle is easy to generate while providing good bit-error-rate (BER) performance. The Gaussian monocycle has a wide -10 dB bandwidth and a zero-DC component which does not decrease antenna efficiency. The transmitter design includes a delay locked loop (DLL) based frequency synthesis approach. The advantage of using a frequency synthesis approach based on a DLL is based on the fact that a DLL generates less noise than a phase locked loop (PLL) and is inherently stable. The generated pulse has a width of less than 350 ps and a -10 dB bandwidth of 4.7 GHz. The power consumption of the designed UWBIR transmitter is 20 mW at a voltage supply of 3.3 V. Compared with other integrated UWB-IR transmitters, the transmitter presented in this thesis has the lowest pulse width for comparable integrated processes, one of the lower power consumptions and a low die area. The BER performance of several UWB-IR non-coherent receiver structures is presented. The energy detection (ED) receiver offers the same BER performance as the transmitted reference scheme with binary pulse amplitude modulation (BPAM) but has a lower implementation complexity since it does not require an analogue delay line in its structure. Circuit performance of several blocks of the ED receiver is presented. The radio frequency (RF) front-end and analogue baseband sections of the receiver have been designed as an integrated circuit (IC) in a 0.35 μm bipolar complementary metal oxide semiconductor (BiCMOS) process. The RF front-end section includes a low noise amplifier (LNA), a variable gain amplifier (VGA) and a Gilbert cell. The LNA has a noise figure (NF) of less than 3 dB, a gain of 18 dB in the interest bandwidth and less than 20 mW of power consumption. The NF of the LNA can be reduced even further at the expense of a higher power consumption or by using input pads with lower capacitance values. The noise figure can be also lowered by using a process which provides transistors with higher transit frequency (fT). Trading-off power consumption for noise is still a key design issue in the design of integrated UWB-IR receivers. The analogue baseband section includes a bank of integrators and a 4-bit analogue to digital converter (ADC). The ADC is running at a sampling rate equal to the symbol rate and takes only 2 mW of power at 3.3 V supply. The power consumption of the designed integrated front-end and analogue baseband receiver sections is 117 mW at a power supply of 3.3 V. The digital baseband of the receiver have been implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. The power consumption of the baseband is 450 mW with a power supply of 1.2 V and a maximum supply of 3.3 V for input-output pins. The total power consumption of the designed transceiver is 587 mW. When compared with other UWB receiver architectures, the energy detection receiver has the lowest power consumption due to the low power consumption of the LNA, simple synchronization architecture and low sampling rate of the ADC.

Ultra Wide Band (UWB) is a new spectrum allocation which was recently approved by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) and is under study in Europe and Asia. It has emerged as a solution to provide low complexity, low cost, low power consumption, and high-data-rate wireless connectivity devices entering the personal space. Any wireless system that has a fractional bandwidth greater than 20% and a total bandwidth larger than 500MHz enters in the UWB definition. At the emission level, UWB signals have a mask that limits its spectral power density to -41.3dBM/MHz between 3.1Ghz and 10.6GHz. There are two approaches that have been studied in order to use the 7.5Ghz allocated for UWB systems. First, OFDM techniques can be used to cover the entire spectrum; these techniques are called multi-band UWB. On the other hand, the second approach makes use of impulse radios which generate very-short-duration baseband pulses that occupy the whole spectrum. The objective of this thesis is to study, design, prototype, and test a UWB impulse radio using off-chip components. A Direct Sequence (DS) UWB transceiver architecture was selected. The transmitter uses first derivative Gaussian pulses that are modulated using a bi-phase modulation technique. The pulse rate of the system is 100MHz and the bit rates under investigation were 100Mbps, 50Mbps, 25Mbps, and 10Mbps. The transmitter and receiver were divided in functional blocks in order to execute system level simulations. The transmitter was implemented in both schematics and layout, and the UWB pulse generator block was constructed and tested in order to validate its functionality. On the other hand, the off-chip implementation of the receiver presented particular difficulties that made its construction not possible in this study. As a result, the blocks of the receiver were implemented in Matlab and the performance of the whole transceiver was estimated through numeric simulations. Finally, a case study for the multi-user capability of the system was presented.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication has been the subject of extensive research in recent years due to its unique capabilities and potential applications, particularly in short-range multiple access wireless communications. However, many important aspects of UWB-based communication systems have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The propagation of UWB signals in indoor environments is the single most important issue with significant impacts on the future direction, scope, and generally the extent of the success of UWB technology. The objective of this dissertation is to obtain a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of the potentials of UWB technology by characterizing the UWB communication channels. Channel characterization refers to extracting the channel parameters from measured data. The extracted parameters are used to quantify the effect of the channel on communication UWB systems using this channel as signal transmission medium. Data are measured in different ways using a variety of time-domain and frequency-domain techniques. The experimental setups used in channel characterization effort also include pulse generators and antennas as integral parts of the channel, since the pulse shape and antenna characteristics have significant impact on channel parameters. At a fundamental level, the propagation of UWB signals, as any electromagnetic wave, is governed, among other things, by the properties of materials in the propagation medium. One of the objectives of this research is to examine propagation through walls made of typical building materials and thereby acquire ultra-wideband characterization of these materials. The loss and the dielectric constant of each material are measured over a frequency range of 1 to 15 GHz. Ten commonly used building materials are chosen for this investigation. These include, dry wall, wallboard, structure wood, glass sheet, bricks, concrete blocks, reinforced concrete (as pillar), cloth office partition, wooden door, and styrofoam slab. The work on ultra-wideband characterization of building materials resulted in an additional interesting contribution. A new formulation for evaluating the complex dielectric constant of low-loss materials, which involves solving real equations and thus requiring only one-dimensional root searching techniques, was found. The results derived from the exact complex equation and from the new formulation are in excellent agreement. Following the characterization of building materials, an indoor UWB measurement campaign is undertaken. Typical indoor scenarios, including line-of-sight (LOS), non-line-of-sight (NLOS), room-to-room, within-the-room, and hallways, are considered. Results for indoor propagation measurements are presented for local power delay profiles (local-PDP) and small-scale averaged power delay profiles (SSA-PDP). Site-specific trends and general observations are discussed. The results for pathloss exponent and time dispersion parameters are presented. The analyses results indicate the immunity of UWB signals to multipath fading. The results also clearly show that UWB signals, unlike narrowband signals, do not suffer from small scale fading, unless the receiver is too close to walls. Multipath components are further studies by employing a deconvolution technique. The application of deconvolution results in resolving multipath components with waveforms different from those of the sounding pulse. Resolving more components can improve the design of the rake receiver. The final part of this research elaborates on the nature of multiple access interference and illustrates the application of multi-user detection to improve the performance of impulse radio systems. Measured dispersion parameters and their effects on the multiple access parameters are discussed. / Ph. D.

In Impulse Radio based Ultra Wide Band (UWB) systems, where sub-nano second pulses are used, synchronization is very challenging because of their short pulse duration and very low duty cycle. Coherent detection of ultra wide-band signals requires complex channel estimation algorithms. In impulse based UWB systems, suboptimal receivers that require no channel estimation are proposed for low data rate applications using non coherent detection of energy. This approach requires integrators that collect energy and detect the incoming stream of bits for detection and synchronization. These techniques yield reasonable performance when compared to coherent detection techniques that require complex hardware and dissipate more energy. Non-coherent detection is a promising technique for low complexity, low cost and low data rate ultra-wideband communication applications like sensor area networks. In the past, several attempts have been made to characterize the performance of the energy collection receivers for synchronization using various metrics that include time of arrival and BER measurements. A comprehensive study of the synchronization problem using Probability of False Alarm is limited. The current thesis attempts to characterize the synchronization problem using Probability of False Alarm and Probability of Detection under various channel models and also discusses the importance of the length of the integration window for energy collection receivers. The current work also focuses on the performance evaluation of synchronization for Impulse based UWB systems using energy capture method and modeling them using the Probability of False Alarm and Probability of Detection under various channel models. In these systems, the integration region of a receiver integrator significantly affects the bit error rate (BER) performance. The effect of the integration window on the performance of the algorithm is also studied. This work also discusses the trade-offs between complexity and precision in using these algorithms for synchronization of Impulse based Direct Sequence Ultra Wideband Systems (DS-UWB). Signal to Noise Ratio vs. Probability of Detection, Probability of False Alarm are plotted for different channel models. / Master of Science

Ultra-Wideband has recently gained great interest for high-speed short-range communications (e.g. home networking applications) as well as low-speed long-range communications (e.g. sensor network applications). Two flavors of UWB have recently emerged as strong contenders for the technology. One is based on Impulse Radio techniques extended to direct sequence spread spectrum. The other technique is based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. Both schemes are analyzed in this thesis and modifications are proposed to increase the performance of each system. For both schemes, the issue of simultaneously operating users has been investigated. Current MAC design for UWB has relied heavily on existing MAC architectures in order to maintain backward compatibility. It remains to be seen if the existing MACs adequately support the UWB PHY (Physical) layer for the applications envisioned for UWB. Thus, in this work we propose a new MAC scheme for an Impulse Radio based UWB PHY, which is based on a CDMA approach using a code-broker in a piconet architecture. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with the traditional CSMA scheme as well as the receiver-based code assignment scheme. A new scheme is proposed to increase the overall performance of the Multiband-OFDM system. Two schemes proposed to increase the performance of the system in the presence of simultaneously operating piconets (namely Half Pulse Repetition Frequency and Time spreading) are studied. The advantages/disadvantages of both of the schemes are discussed. / Master of Science

Les travaux présentés lors de cette thèse s’inscrivent dans le cadre des réseaux de microsystèmes communicants dont les réseaux de capteurs sont l’exemple le plus connu. La problématique adressée est la conception d’une interface radio communicante répondant aux besoins spécifiques des microsystèmes communicants : simplicité, faible coût, faible consommation, faible encombrement, haut débit et reconfigurabilité. Les technologies actuelles sans fil comme le WiFi, le Bluetooth, et Zigbee ne sont pas en mesure de répondre à ces contraintes spécifiques. L’étude se focalise sur la technologie IR-UWB (Impulse Radio Ultra-WideBand). Dans un premier temps, une étude conjointe sur la capacité du canal et l’implémentation matérielle est menée pour déterminer l’architecture optimale des émetteurs-récepteurs en IR-UWB. Cette étude propose l’utilisation d’une architecture multi bandes IR-UWB (MB-IR-UWB) à implémentation mixte à 60 GHz avec des antennes directives. Cette solution est optimisée sur les critères de débit et puissance consommée. Afin de supporter l’ensemble des besoins des applications des réseaux de microsystèmes communicants et l’évolution de l’environnement d’opération, la reconfigurabilité doit être implémentée dans les émetteur-récepteurs proposés. Ces travaux présentent une proposition de reconfigurabilité par paramètres, qui permet de supporter la plus grande gamme de reconfigurabilités multi propriétés (débit, taux d’erreur, portée, puissance consommée, …) de l’état de l’art. Enfin, pour valider par la mesure les travaux sur la reconfigurabilité et sur les architectures d’émetteur-récepteurs IR-UWB, des implémentations FPGA et ASIC sont réalisées. Un nouveau procédé de synchronisation et démodulation conjointe reconfigurable est proposé dans le récepteur IR-UWB BPSK S-Rake. Les mesures montrent que le circuit de traitement proposé améliore les performances en synchronisation, démodulation, efficacité, débit du réseau, consommation et complexité du circuit. L’émetteur-récepteur IR-UWB reconfigurable proposé atteint un débit et une gamme de reconfigurabilité supérieure à l’état de l’art. / The research work presented in this thesis is situated in the framework of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The issue addressed is the design of a radio interface answering the specific needs of WSNs: simplicity, low cost, low power, small size, high data rate and reconfigurability. Current wireless technologies like WiFi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee are not able to respond to these requirements. Thus this study focuses on Impulse Radio Ultra-WideBand (IR-UWB) technology. At first, a joint study of the channel capacity and the hardware implementation is carried out to determine the optimal architecture of IR-UWB transceivers. This study proposes an architecture using multi-band IR-UWB (MB-UWB-IR) with a mixed implementation at 60 GHz with directional antennas. This solution is optimized according to the criteria of data rate and power consumption. To support the all the needs of WSN applications and to adapt to the evolution of the WSN’s environment, reconfigurability must be implemented in the proposed IR-UWB transceiver. This thesis presents a new solution: the reconfigurability by parameters. It supports the widest range of multi-property reconfigurability (with respect to data rate, bit error rate, radio range, power consumption, ...) of the state of the art. Finally, to validate these techniques by measurements, FPGA and ASIC implementations are realized by using the reconfigurability and the IR-UWB transceiver architecture proposed. A new method for joint synchronization and demodulation is proposed for a reconfigurable IR-UWB BPSK S-Rake receiver. The measurements show that the proposed technique improves the circuit performance: synchronization, demodulation, efficiency, network throughput, power consumption and complexity of the circuit. The proposed IR-UWB reconfigurable transceiver achieves a data rate and a wider range of reconfigurability compared to the state of the art

La technologie Ultra WideBand (UWB) sur fibre est une solution prometteuse pour répondre aux enjeux des futurs réseaux de communication WLAN/WPAN. Les caractéristiques de la fibre, incluant son énorme bande passante, offrent la possibilité d'une bonne qualité de service à longue portée. La propagation sans-fil UWB doit être réalisée sous des contraintes de densité spectrale de puissance particulières, imposées par l'autorité de régulation (FCC pour les Etats-Unis). La nouveauté de notre travail provient de I' exploitation des avantages d'un amplificateur optique à semi-conducteurs (SOA) afin d'obtenir une extension de portée à un coût et une complexité limités. Cependant, les effets non linéaires et le bruit d'émission spontanée amplifiée (ASE), intrinsèques à ce type de composant, sont susceptibles de dégrader la performance du système. La réduction de ces effets indésirables a donc été d'une importance centrale dans cette étude. Les non-linéarités du SOA ont été compensées en appliquant une solution de pré-distorsion analogique des formes d'ondes électriques. Un traitement basé sur phaser a également été proposé pour réduire simultanément I' influence de I'ASE et linéariser les caractéristiques du SOA, grâce à des opérations de chirping réparties entre l'émetteur et le récepteur. Avec la transmission Impulse Radio, en raison des propriétés temporelles des formats de modulation, des raies spectrales apparaissent, ce qui peut violer la limite FCC ou réduire I' efficacité énergétique. Une nouvelle technique de randomisation de formes d'ondes a été étudiée, qui s'est révélée efficace pour supprimer ces pics spectraux. Les trois approches ont montré un grand potentiel avec les formats On Off Keying et Pulse Position Modulation, à longue portée optique. Les performances d'une modulation différentielle Chaos Shift Keying ont finalement été examinées; une probabilité d'erreur inférieure a été obtenue expérimentalement en comparaison avec d'autres modulations non cohérentes. / Ultra WideBand (UWB) over fiber is a promising technology for meeting the demands of future wireless local-area networks (WLANs) and wireless personal-area networks (WPANs). Thanks to the enormous bandwidth and fiber characteristics, a high communication quality may be established at long reach. UWB wireless propagation must be achieved with special power and spectral constraints fixed by the regulatory bodies (e.g. US Federal Communication Commission). The novelty of our work originates from exploiting the benefits of a Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA) so as to get a reach extension at limited cost and complexity. However, the inherent nonlinear effects and Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) noise associated to such device may affect the system performance.Overcoming these impairments has been of central importance in this study. SOA nonlinearities have been mitigated by applying analog pre-distortion in electrical domain. Phaser-based processing was also proposed to simultaneously reduce ASE influence and linearize SOA characteristics, thanks to up/down chirping performed on the transmitter/receiver sides. With Impulse Radio UWB transmission, due to the time properties of modulation patterns, discrete lines arise in the corresponding spectrum, which may violate FCC limit or reduce the power efficiency. A new shape randomization technique has been investigated, which proved to be effective in suppressing these spectral spikes. The three approaches have shown a great potential with On Off Keying and Pulse Position Modulation formats at long optical reach.The performance of Differential Chaos Shift Keying was finally examined in the over fiber system, a lower error probability was experimentally achieved in comparison with other non-coherent modulations.

Despite the fact ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has been around for over 30 years, there is a newfound excitement about its potential for communications. With the advantageous qualities of multipath immunity and low power spectral density, researchers are examining fundamental questions about UWB communication systems. In this work, we examine UWB communication systems paying particular attention to transmitter and receiver design. This thesis is specifically focused on a software radio transceiver design for impulse-based UWB with the ability to transmit a raw data rate of 100 Mbps yet encompasses the adaptability of a reconfigurable digital receiver. A 500 ps wide Gaussian pulse is generated at the transmitter utilizing the fast-switching characteristics of a step recovery diode. Pulse modulation is accomplished via several stages of RF switches, filters, and amplifiers on a fully designed printed circuit board specifically manufactured for this project. Critical hardware components at the receiver consist of a bank of ADCs performing parallel sampling and an FPGA employed for data processing. Using a software radio design, various modulation schemes and digital receiver topologies are accommodated along with a vast number of algorithms for acquisition, synchronization, and data demodulation methods. Verification for the design is accomplished through transmitter hardware testing and receiver design simulation. The latter includes bit error rate testing for a variety of modulation schemes and wireless channels using a pilot-based matched filter estimation technique. Ultimately, the transceiver design demonstrates the advantages and challenges of UWB technology while boasting high data rate communication capability and providing the flexibility of a research testbed. / Master of Science

Les réseaux à l'origine métropolitains, ont connu une tendance à rétrécir pour aujourd'hui se concentrer autour de l'être humain. Avec des équipements de plus en plus miniatures et les utilisateurs désireux de disposer en permanence des services qui leur sont accessibles à domicile, le réseau est envisagé plus petit, plus proche du corps. On assiste alors à l'émergence du réseau corporel, le Body Area Network (BAN), qui est constitué d'éléments situés sur le corps, à l'intérieur ou encore à une courte distance. Ce réseau à portée du corps génère de nouvelles problématiques, notamment celles de la puissance rayonnée par les équipements, leur taille, leur poids...Les applications et usages envisagés pour un tel réseau sont variés et couvrent plusieurs domaines d'activités, en l'occurrence le secteur du médical, du sport, et le multimédia. Ce réseau doit donc reposer sur une couche physique qui s'adapte aux contraintes de ces diverses applications, tout en favorisant des équipements de faible taille, faible complexité et de forte autonomie. La technologie Ultra Large Bande impulsionnelle (UWB-IR) est porteuse de nombreuses promesses pour satisfaire en partie les besoins des réseaux BAN, car autorisant des débits aussi bien réduits qu'élevés, et les architectures d'émission et réception utilisables pour cette technologie rendent possibles des équipements à faible complexité et faible coût, et dont la consommation énergétique est réduite.Ce travail de thèse a débuté alors qu'un processus de normalisation sur les BAN était en cours. L'objectif des travaux menés était de pouvoir contribuer en partie à ce processus de normalisation par la proposition d'une couche physique basée sur la radio impulsionnelle UWB (UWB-IR). Ainsi notre étude a porté sur le paramétrage de cette couche physique à partir de l'analyse des contraintes et requis techniques d'un réseau BAN. Les performances de cette couche physique ont ensuite été évaluées dans un contexte de canal UWB BAN et suivant le type d'architecture en réception, en particulier pour le récepteur non-cohérent. Enfin, une attention a été apportée sur la robustesse de la liaison en présence d'interférences bande étroite. Dans l'ensemble, ce travail a permis d'étudier et d'évaluer la pertinence d'une couche physique UWB-IR dans le contexte du réseau BAN / Absence de résumé en anglais

Timing offsets result from the use of real clocks that are non-ideal in sampling intervals. These offsets also known as timing jitter were shown to degrade the performance of the two forms of UWB systems impulse radio and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based UWB. It was shown that for impulse radio, timing jitter distorts the correlation property of the transmitted signal and the resulting performance loss is proportional to the root-mean-square (RMS) value of the timing jitter. For the OFDM-based UWB, timing jitter introduced inter-channel interference (ICI) and the performance loss was dependent on the product of the bandwidth and the RMS of the timing jitter. A number of techniques were proposed for mitigating the performance degradation in each form of UWB. Specifically, for impulse radio, the methods of pulse shaping and sample averaging were provided, whereas for OFDM-based UWB, oversampling and adaptive modulation were given. Through analysis and simulation, it was shown that substantial gain in signal power-to-noise ratio can be achieved using these jitter-reduction methods.