A 65 nm CMOS Ultra-Low-Power Impulse Radio-Ultra-Wideband Emitter for Short-Range Indoor Localization

This paper presents an ultra-low-power IR-UWB pulse generator based on a dedicated design of a chain comprising of a voltage controlled ring oscillator, a buffer and a pulse shaping filter. A control voltage can be used to set the pulse repetition frequency. The design was made using 65 nm CMOS technology. The design was optimized in order to meet target specifications (pulse width, repetition frequency, PSD, etc.) that are suitable for short-range indoor localization. The generator produces a pulse having 0.5 ns width and 930 mV peak-to-peak amplitude prior to the antenna. The -10 dB bandwidth is from 1 to 7 GHz with an amplitude less than -40 dBm/MHz which makes it compliant with the FCC spectral mask. The energy consumption is 1.5 pJ per pulse while the energy driven to the antenna is 60 to 65% of the total energy consumed by the circuit per pulse. According to the state-of-the-art, this is the minimum consumption that we were able to achieve.