Super-regenerative Receiver for UWB-FM

Super-regenerative Receiver for UWB-FM

Hou, R.

Long, J.R. (mentor)
Saputra, N. (mentor)
De Vreede, L.C.N. (mentor)
Makinwa, K.A.A. (mentor)

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

2008-09-30

UWB-FM is a low-complexity ultra-wideband (UWB) communication system designed for short-range, low- and medium-data-rate wireless applications such as the personal area network (PAN). These applications often require simple, integrated receivers with low power consumption. Most of previous work utilized delay-line demodulators for UWB-FM detection. This coherent detection method offers the best performance in general but is not necessarily power-efficient. Reported power consumption was around 20 mW for a 2 GHz RF bandwidth. The goal of this research is to explore the possibility of reducing power consumption of a UWB-FM receiver by exploiting the super-regeneration principle. As a result, a fully integrated super-regenerative receiver in IBM 90-nm RF CMOS technology is designed to detect 500 MHz bandwidth UWB-FM signals at 4.5 GHz. Circuit simulations show that a receiver sensitivity of -82.2 dB is attainable for a 100 kbps baseband data-rate and 10^{-6} bit-error-rate. The whole receiver draws an average of 2 mA from a 0.9 V supply. This work is, according to the author's knowledge, the first time the super-regeneration principle is used for UWB-FM detection. The 1.8 mW power dissipation is also by far the smallest among UWB-FM receivers reported in the literature. In addition, the contribution of this work includes an innovative optimization of the quenching waveform for WBFM detection and a novel low-power driven design procedure for LNAs. In conclusion, super-regenerative receivers are promising for short-range, low-data-rate UWB-FM applications, due to their simplicity and low power-consumption.

super-regenerative receiver
low-power
uwb-fm

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:73f81186-198d-4de9-a19a-52423b694d43

TU Delft, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Microelectronics

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2008 R. Hou