This thesis documents the design and analysis of a low-power integrated ultra-wideband (UWB) receiver that is well suited for usage in medium to low rate, location aware communication systems. For the first time, this receiver design explores and exploits the unique properties of UWB pulse technology. By exploiting low emission power limit and pulse based communication, RF circuits have been designed with reduced linearity to achieve low-power operation and better circuit performance. The receiver design in this thesis follows a top-down approach which begins by focusing on UWB-specific issues such as signal characteristics, modulation schemes, potential advantages, and design challenges. Next, different receiver architectures are evaluated in terms of their circuit complexity, power consumption, and levels of integration. The impact of various analog non-idealities on the performance of UWB systems is also analysed in detail. After evaluating the performance of UWB systems operating with non-linear frontends, the use of pulse doublets is introduced, for the first time, to mitigate nonlinearityinduced distortion. Simulation results demonstrate that under non-linear operating conditions, significant BER improvements can be achieved by using filtering, pulse doublet, and direct sequence spread spectrum techniques. When ADC quantization effects are included in the receiver, analysis shows that quantization noise dominates distortion-induced BER degradation when two or three bits ADCs are employed. Consequently, reduced front-end linearity requirements can be tolerated in exchange for improvements in the more critical circuit parameters of the UWB receiver. By adopting the sub-linear circuit design approach, a direct-conversion receiver prototype is implemented in the 0.5 um SOS CMOS technology according to specifications determined from system-level Simulink simulations. This highly integrated receiver prototype contains a low-noise amplifier, a 4-GHz frequency synthesizer, mixers, baseband amplifiers and filters, and 2-GSps two-bit analog-to-digital converters. The receiver prototype consumes 75-mW of power, the lowest amount for reported UWB receivers operating in the 3.1 to 10.6-GHz band. Complete end-to-end simulations of the system are performed in Simulink, revealing an achievable BER of approximately 8x10e-4 Finally, a novel 79-uW 5.6-GHz CMOS frequency divider with on-chip temperature and processing compensation have been designed. The divider, designed in a 0.25 um SOS-CMOS technology, occupies 35 x 25 um2 and achieves an operating frequency of 5.6-GHz while consuming 79-uW at a supply voltage of 0.8V. The power efficiency of 143-GHz/mW is one of the highest achieved among conventional CMOS dividers. When combined with a simple and effective compensation submodule, the proposed divider is shown to achieve process and temperature-insensitive operation in a 5-GHz UNII band frequency synthesizer.

<p>This master thesis is as a final project in the Division of Computer Engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköpings University, Sweden. </p><p>The purpose of the project is to design a wide frequency range programmable frequency divider used in a PLL circuit for ultra wide band system. 0.18 um tsmc CMOS technology is used in this project. </p><p>A brief introduction of PLL circuits and UWB specifications are given in the report and the circuit design issue is presented. Post-layout simulation results are shown in the later part of the report. </p><p>The focus of this project is to make the frequency divider work well in wide range and high speed. Therefore, how to shorten feedback circuits’ latency and how to reduce complexity of the circuits are the main problems. Logic gate merged technique is used to reduce transistor number and carefully drawing layout makes the circuit work well in post-layout simulation.</p>

<p>Ultra wideband (UWB) communication systems refers to systems whose bandwidth is many times greater than the “narrowband” systems (refers to a signal which occupies only small amount of space on the radio spectrum). UWB can be used for indoor, communications for high data rates, or very low data rates for substantial link distances because of the extremely large bandwidth, immune to multi-path fading, penetrations through concrete block or obstacles. UWB can also used for short distance ranging whose applications include asset location in a warehouse, position location for wireless sensor networks, and collision avoidance.</p><p>In order to verify analytical and simulation results with real-world measurements, the need for experimental UWB systems arises. The Institute of Communications Engineering [IANT] has developed a low-cost experimental UWB positioning system to test UWB based positioning concepts. The mobile devices use the avalanche effect of transistors for simple generation of bi-phase pulses and are TDMA multi-user capable. The receiver is implemented in software and employs coherent cross-correlation with peak detection to localize the mobile unit via Time-Difference-Of-Arrival (TDOA) algorithms. Since the power of a proposed UWB system’s signal spread over a very wide bandwidth, the frequencies allocated to multiple existing narrowband systems may interfere with UWB spectrum. The goal of the filters discussed in this project is to cancel or suppress the interference while not distort the desired signal. To investigate the interference, we develop a algorithm to calculate the interference tones. In this thesis, we assume the interference to be narrowband interference (NBI) modeled as sinusoidal tones with unknown amplitude, frequency and phase. If we known the interference tones then it may be removed using a simple notched filter. Herein, we chose an adaptive filter so that it can adjust the interference tone automatically and cancel. In this thesis I tested adaptive filter technique to cancel interference cancellation (ie) LMS algorithm and Adaptive Noise Cancellation (ANC) technique. In this thesis performance of the both filters are compared.</p>

Les avancées technologiques de ces dernières années, combinées au succès avéré et toujours croissant des communications sans fil, ont tout naturellement donné naissance à un nouveau type de réseaux sans fil, communément appelés Body Area networks. A terme, ces réseaux corporels sans fil doivent permettre à un ensemble de senseurs bio-médicaux répartis sur le corps humain de communiquer, soit pour échanger des informations en vue d'un traitement en temps réel du patient, soit pour enregistrer des données physiologiques en vue d'une analyse ultérieure. L’objectif de cette Thèse vise la réduction de la consommation énergétique au niveau des senseurs de sorte à leur garantir une autonomie de quelques mois, voire de quelques années. En réponse à cette contrainte énergétique, une association innovante de deux technologies émergentes est proposée, à savoir une combinaison des transmissions à ultra-large bande aux systèmes à multiples antennes. Une nouvelle architecture pour les réseaux corporels sans fil est donc envisagée pour laquelle les performances doivent être évaluées. Notre principale contribution à cet objectif consiste en la proposition d'une modélisation spatio-temporelle complète du canal de transmission dans le cadre de senseurs répartis autour du corps. Cette modélisation fait appel à la définition de nouveaux modèles, l'élaboration d'outils spécifiques d'extraction de paramètres et une compréhension fine des mécanismes de propagation liés à la proximité du corps humain. Ce manuscrit présente les résultats majeurs de nos recherches en cette matière.

In recent years, ultra-wideband (UWB) communications has gained tremendous popularity in both research community and industry. The large bandwidth of UWB systems raises new wireless channel effects and consequently unique advantages as well as challenges to be dealt with, compared to conventional wireless systems. One of these advantages is the ability to resolve dense multipath components and use Rake combining at the receiver in order to significantly reduce the negative effects of fading. However, implementing a Rake receiver with a sufficiently large number of fingers to make use of this advantage is an evident challenge for most UWB devices with limited signal processing capabilities. A possible approach to overcome this problem is to move computational complexity from the receiver to the more powerful transmitter, which is the main focus of the present work. In this thesis, we propose two novel pre-equalization schemes for multiple- input single-output (MISO) direct-sequence ultra-wideband (DS-UWB) systems with pre-Rake combining and symbol-by-symbol detection. The first pre-equalization filter (PEF) scheme employs one PEF per transmit antenna, whereas in the second, simplified PEF (S-PEF) scheme all transmit antennas share the same PEF. For both schemes the optimum finite impulse response (FIR) and infinite impulse response (IIR) PEFs are calculated based on the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) criterion. We show that in contrast to previously proposed schemes for DS-UWB, both our proposed PEF schemes efficiently exploit the channel shortening properties of the pre-Rake filter. In particular, our proposed PEF schemes operate at the symbol level. We also show that under certain conditions the S-PEF scheme achieves the same performance as the more complex PEF scheme. Finally, we demonstrate that a single-input multiple-output (SIMO) DS-UWB system with post-Rake combining and MMSE post-equalization is the dual system to the considered MISO DS–UWB system with pre-Rake combining and MMSE pre-equalization. This uplink-downlink duality can be exploited for efficient calculation of the PEFs and for complexity reduction. Our simulation results show that the proposed PEF schemes achieve significant performance gains over pre-Rake combining without equalization even if only short PEFs are employed, and this is the case even for long UWB channel impulse responses.

Ultra wideband (UWB) communication systems refers to systems whose bandwidth is many times greater than the “narrowband” systems (refers to a signal which occupies only small amount of space on the radio spectrum). UWB can be used for indoor, communications for high data rates, or very low data rates for substantial link distances because of the extremely large bandwidth, immune to multi-path fading, penetrations through concrete block or obstacles. UWB can also used for short distance ranging whose applications include asset location in a warehouse, position location for wireless sensor networks, and collision avoidance. In order to verify analytical and simulation results with real-world measurements, the need for experimental UWB systems arises. The Institute of Communications Engineering [IANT] has developed a low-cost experimental UWB positioning system to test UWB based positioning concepts. The mobile devices use the avalanche effect of transistors for simple generation of bi-phase pulses and are TDMA multi-user capable. The receiver is implemented in software and employs coherent cross-correlation with peak detection to localize the mobile unit via Time-Difference-Of-Arrival (TDOA) algorithms. Since the power of a proposed UWB system’s signal spread over a very wide bandwidth, the frequencies allocated to multiple existing narrowband systems may interfere with UWB spectrum. The goal of the filters discussed in this project is to cancel or suppress the interference while not distort the desired signal. To investigate the interference, we develop a algorithm to calculate the interference tones. In this thesis, we assume the interference to be narrowband interference (NBI) modeled as sinusoidal tones with unknown amplitude, frequency and phase. If we known the interference tones then it may be removed using a simple notched filter. Herein, we chose an adaptive filter so that it can adjust the interference tone automatically and cancel. In this thesis I tested adaptive filter technique to cancel interference cancellation (ie) LMS algorithm and Adaptive Noise Cancellation (ANC) technique. In this thesis performance of the both filters are compared.

The thesis is mainly focused on a hybrid location system, which processes wireless and inertial measurements by extended Kalman filtering. Inertial location system is usually used with Dead-Reckoning method, which calculates the present location and heading direction from a previous known state by using measurements of accelerometer and gyroscope, which have immunity from the environment. The system estimates the position by integrates the measurements of sensors, resulting in high accuracy during a short period. However, the unreliability grows with time due to the bias effect on sensors. By combining the wireless location and inertial system, the uncertainty of estimation can be reduced. In wireless communications, the locations of base stations and the times of signal arrival can be used in locating a mobile station. However, signal propagation could be blocked by objects. The non-line of sight (NLOS) effects cause arrival delay and is usually modeled as exponential distributions. Previously, the improved biased Kalman filters were designed to mitigate the NLOS effect in base station measurements. The system design has difficulty in accommodating inertial measurements. The inertial has immunity to the environment. The property is of help in the NLOS mitigation. Therefore, we propose a hybrid location system that integrating the wireless and inertial measurements by using a hybrid biased extended Kalman filter at the stage of positioning. The system provides better prediction with the assistance of enviroment-free inertial measurements. The NLOS mitigation with prediction feedback scheme results in better mitigation performance. Simulations of different situations have been conducted based on parameters in the IEEE 802.15.3a ultra-wideband environment. The performance differences between the proposed method and other approaches show that inertial assisted system effectively reduces the NLOS effects. Also, the proposed hybrid location system has more efficient mitigation performance and better tracking results.

In the future, space solar power transmission and wireless power transmission will play an important role in gathering clean and infinite energy from space. The rectenna, i.e., a rectifying circuit combined with an antenna, is one of the most important components in the wireless power transmission system. To obtain high power and high output voltage, the use of a large rectenna array is necessary. Many novel rectennas and rectenna arrays for microwave and millimeter-wave wireless power transmission have been developed. Unlike the traditional rectifying circuit using a single diode, dual diodes are used to double the DC output voltage with the same circuit layout dimensions. The rectenna components are then combined to form rectenna arrays using different interconnections. The rectennas and the arrays are analyzed by using a linear circuit model. Furthermore, to precisely align the mainbeams of the transmitter and the receiver, a retrodirective array is developed to maintain high efficiency. The retrodirective array is able to track the incident wave and resend the signal to where it came from without any prior known information of the source location. The ultra-wideband radio has become one of the most important communication systems because of demand for high data-rate transmission. Hence, ultra-wideband antennas have received much attention in mobile wireless communications. Planar monopole ultra-wideband antennas for UHF, microwave, and millimeter-wave bands are developed, with many advantages such as simple structure, low cost, light weight, and ease of fabrication. Due to the planar structures, the ultra-wideband antennas can be easily integrated with other circuits. On the other hand, with an ultra-wide bandwidth, source power can be transmitted at different frequencies dependent on power availability. Furthermore, the ultra-wideband antenna can potentially handle wireless power transmission and data communications simultaneously. The technologies developed can also be applied to dual-frequency or the multi-frequency antennas. In this dissertation, many new rectenna arrays, retrodirective rectenna arrays, and ultra-wideband antennas are presented for microwave and millimeter-wave applications. The technologies are not only very useful for wireless power transmission and communication systems, but also they could have many applications in future radar, surveillance, and remote sensing systems.

Ultra-wideband technology (UWB) has received tremendous attention since the FCC license release in 2002, which expedited the research and development of UWB technologies on consumer products. The applications of UWB range from ground penetrating radar, distance sensor, through wall radar to high speed, short distance communications. The CMOS integrated circuit is an attractive, low cost approach for implementing UWB technology. The improving cut-off frequency of the transistor in CMOS process makes the CMOS circuit capable of handling signal at multi-giga herz. However, some design challenges still remain to be solved. Unlike regular narrow band signal, the UWB signal is discrete pulse instead of continuous wave (CW), which results in the occupancy of wide frequency range. This demands that UWB front-end circuits deliver both time domain and frequency domain signal processing over broad bandwidth. Witnessing these technique challenges, this dissertation aims at designing novel, high performance components for UWB signal generation, down-conversion, as well as accurate timing control using low cost CMOS technology. We proposed, designed and fabricated a carrier based UWB transmitter to facilitate the discrete feature of the UWB signal. The transmitter employs novel twostage -switching to generate carrier based UWB signal. The structure not only minimizes the current consumption but also eliminates the use of a UWB power amplifier. The fabricated transmitter is capable of delivering tunable UWB signal over the complete 3.1GHz -10.6GHz UWB band. By applying the similar two-stage switching approach, we were able to implement a novel switched-LNA based UWB sampling receiver frontend. The proposed front-end has significantly lower power consumption compared to previously published design while keep relatively high gain and low noise at the same time. The designed sampling mixer shows unprecedented performance of 9-12dB voltage conversion gain, 16-25dB noise figure, and power consumption of only 21.6mW(with buffer) and 11.7mW(without buffer) across dc to 3.5GHz with 100M-Hz sampling frequency. The implementation of a precise delay generator is also presented in the dissertation. It relies on an external reference clock to provide accurate timing against process, supply voltage and temperature variation through a negative feedback loop. The delay generator prototype has been verified having digital programmability and tunable delay step resolution. The relative delay shift from desired value is limited to within 0.2%.

This work describes the design and measurement of a compact bidirectional ultrawideband (UWB) modified equiangular spiral antenna with an integrated feed internally matched to a 50-Ohm microstrip transmission line. A UWB transition from microstrip to double-sided parallel-strip line (DSPSL) soldered to a short (1.14 mm) twin-line transmission line feeds the spiral. The currents on the feed travel in a direction approximately perpendicular to the direction of the currents on the spiral at the points where the feed passes the spiral in close proximity (0.57 mm). Holes were etched from the metal arms of the spiral to reduce the impedance mismatch caused by coupling between the transmission line feed and the spiral. This work also describes a low-loss back-to-back transition from coaxial line to DSPSL, an in-phase connectorized 3 dB DSPSL power divider made using three of those transitions, a 2:1 in-phase DSPSL power divider, a 3:1 in-phase DSPSL power divider, a radial dipole fed by DSPSL, an array of those dipoles utilizing the various power dividers, and a UWB circular monopole antenna fed by DSPSL. Measured and simulated results show good agreement for the designed antennas and circuits.