A Baseband, Impulse Ultra Wideband Transceiver for Low Power Applications

Speaker: Dr. Ian O'Donnell, UC BerkeleyAbstract: Low bit-rate, short range radios are being proposed for a variety of applications including remote sensing/control, asset tracking, security, and as a replacement for wired interconnect. While not demanding aggressive throughput, these applications do require low cost, power efficient operation and optionally the ability to perform distance measurements. Unfortunately, current radio performance is up to an order of magnitude away from these cost and power targets. However, ultra-wideband signaling using short impulses presents an attractive alternative that is well-suited to a highly integrated, low power implementation. This talk explores the system performance and power consumption trade-offs, discusses the system specification and low power circuit design, and demonstrates a low power, impulse ultra-wideband transceiver. Based on a digital correlating filter architecture, this transceiver employs the novel approach of duty-cycling the analog gain and sampling circuitry between received pulses to further reduce power consumption. A single-chip front-end design, implemented in a standard digital 0.13micron CMOS process, will be presented. The front-end is comprised of a 1-bit, 1.92Gsample/s ADC, a 50-Ohm input match, 0dB to 42dB of variable gain, programmable control logic, a sub-1-PPM trimmable 60MHz oscillator, and a pulse transmitter. Power consumption was measured at 4mW (RX) and 2mW (TX) for a 30Mpulse/s pulse rate and 0.6mW (RX) and 0.4mW (TX) for 1Mpulse/s at 1.1V. The digital backend functionality was emulated, and extracted simulations predict a power consumption of 3.8mW (tracking) and 33mW (acquisition) during reception at 30Mpulse/s and 0.1mW (tracking) and 1.1mW (acquisition) at 1Mpulse/s.Bio: Ian David O'Donnell received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993, 1996 and 2006 respectively. His master's topic was in the area of digital, low power, CMOS circuit and system design for a wireless LAN receiver as part of the InfoPad project. From 1996 to 1999 he worked at Silicon Graphics, Inc. as a digital ASIC designer, and in 1999 he joined NVIDIA, Inc. where he worked on high-speed serial design. In 1998 he returned to Berkeley at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center to investigate low cost, low power, short range radio design. His Ph.D. research focused on the demonstration of ultra low power communication through the use of impulse-based ultra-wideband signaling combined with an examination of performance and power consumption trade-offs at the system and circuit levels. In 2006 he received the Jack Neubauer Award from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society for the best system paper of the year.Host: Prof. Keith Chugg, chugg@usc.edu

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher