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1636 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 46, NO. 7, JULY 2011
Abstract—This paper presents a fully integrated UWB-IR trans- advantage of extreme duty cycling, at the price of an inefficient
ceiver front-end operating in the 7.25–8.5 GHz band designed for spectral occupation. On the contrary, conventional radios are
high overall transmission and detection energy efficiency and ro- always consuming power when communicating. Despite their
bustness to interferers. The transceiver front-end features a pulsed
transmitter that wakes up when triggered by a digital signal, gener- power consumption can be traded for lower noise performance
ates a pulse, and automatically switches-off in less than 2 ns. The re- at the receiver, or a lower output power at the transmitter, lever-
ceiver includes an LNA, a VGA, a squarer, a windowed integrator, aging a reduced data rate, the need of a frequency synthesizer
and a comparator to perform PPM demodulation of the data. A sets a floor to the minimum possible current constantly drained
prototype of the transceiver front-end was integrated in a 0.13 m from the supply.
CMOS technology. The transmitter delivers 13 pJ/pulse to the an-
tenna consuming about 190 pJ/b, with an efficiency , well In this work, we propose an approach where the transmitter
in excess of comparable designs. Using pulse polarity scrambling, it is designed to generate pulses with the maximum energy (at the
complies with the FCC spectral emission limits up to a pulse repeti- desired pulse rate) allowed by the power spectral density regu-
tion frequency (PRF) of 5 MHz. The receiver achieves a sensitivity lations, with the twofold advantage of improving significantly
of 87 dBm at a PRF of 100 kHz, and of 70 dBm at a PRF of its efficiency with regards to existing transmitter designs and
5 MHz, while consuming 4.2 mW. It can tolerate interferers up to
12 dBm at 5.4 GHz. of relaxing the sensitivity requirements of the receiver. Addi-
tionally, to reduce the risk of blocking by in-band interferers,
Index Terms—CMOS, impulse radio, ultra-wideband, wireless
we chose the 7.25–8.5 GHz frequency range, in the UWB high
sensor networks.
band, which is far from any other commonly used communica-
tion channel, and is the only common range where UWB radios
I. INTRODUCTION can operate in Europe, USA and Japan with similar regulations
[7]. We thus obtained a system which is robust to interferers,
SOLDÀ et al.: A 5 Mb/s UWB-IR TRANSCEIVER FRONT-END FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS IN 0.13 m CMOS 1637
rate and the bandwidth of the transmitted signal are inde- communication range. This choice is not unique and has an
pendent to each other.1 Moreover, while typically in conven- impact on the overall energy consumption of the transceiver.
tional radios the transmission power is set by the regulatory There are several examples [4]–[6], [8]–[12] in which the
limits, in impulse radios it is the maximum transmitted pulse adopted strategy is that of minimizing the total energy spent
energy to be controlled. These differences have a strong impact by the transmitter to generate a pulse, , regardless of
on the link budget of the radios. To gain insight, let us con- the actual energy of the pulse delivered at the antenna, .
sider the simple case of a communication system employing a 1 These designs show almost consistently a TX efficiency
bit-per-symbol modulation scheme, while transmitting 1 pulse of a few percent at most, and implicitly
per bit. The pulse energy at the receiver input is related to demand an extremely sensitive receiver in order to cover
the average received power by a significant communication range. Since sensitivity costs
power, this explains why the energy-per-bit figure of UWB-IR
(1) receivers published in the literature is normally significantly
larger than that of transmitters [4], [6], [8], [9].
where is the transmitted power, is the transmitted
One goal of this work is to achieve minimum overall energy
pulse energy, and is the path loss. For a given receiver noise
consumption for the transmission and reception of one bit of in-
performance, the communication link will show a target bit error
formation for the desired communication range, i.e., for a fixed
rate (BER) if a large enough is accumulated at the receiver.
path loss . The main design variables at the system level are
In a conventional radio, where is fixed, we can use the
then the energy of the transmitted pulse and the link mod-
same receiver and expand the communication range for a given
ulation scheme. is related to the transmitter energy con-
BER trading a longer range for a lower data rate. On the con-
sumption through the efficiency , and determines the
trary, in an impulse radio, since is fixed, the communica-
pulse energy at the receiver input, , through (1). The choice of
tion range is independent on the data rate for a given receiver
the modulation sets the receiver noise specification and thus the
noise performance. However, in this case the received power
achievable energy consumption per bit at the receiver, .
changes as is varied, for a given path loss. As such,
the concept of receiver sensitivity, as given in terms of received The exploration of the design space led to the conclusion that
power, becomes quite slippery in impulse radios, since it does the approach promising better results was to maximize
not convey complete information if not associated to the data and , to enable the choice of a modulation scheme such that
rate. In the following, we will see how these basic considera- the receiver architecture is mostly simplified. In addition, in this
tions translate into a link budget and guide the choices on the way the system does not need an ultra low noise receiver to
system architecture for minimum energy consumption. accommodate the desired communication range, which allows
to reduce the energy consumption.
A. Link Budget It should not be surprising that this approach yields an im-
In the foregoing discussion, we have observed that the provement over the state-of-the-art given the significant margin
starting point in building a link budget for an impulse radio is between the energy-per-bit figure of receivers and transmitters
the limit on the maximum transmitted pulse energy set by the mentioned before, while it is reasonable to expect the minimum
regulatory bodies. The FCC, for example, limits the maximum overall energy consumption to be reached when .
power spectral density (PSD), , to 41.3 dBm/MHz in The transceiver is designed for a generic wireless sensor net-
the 3.1-to-10.6 GHz band, which translates to the following work, with specifications on communication range and data rate
constraint: loosely set as a few meters and a few Mb/s. The selected pulse
bandwidth is GHz, from 7.25 to 8.5 GHz, which is the
(2) only common range where UWB radios can operate in Europe,
USA and Japan with similar regulations [7]. Additionally, this
From (2), it is clear that to maximize the communication range
choice reduces the risk of blocking by in-band interferers, since
one should maximize the pulse bandwidth and reduce the data
this portion of the spectrum is far from any other commonly
rate, a scenario highly compatible with the wireless sensor net-
used communication channel, in particular WLANs at 2.4 GHz
works. However, hardware limitations come also into play when
and 5.4 GHz.
designing the system. Having a large calls for circuits with
Given the emission regulations in the selected band [7],
a large passband fractional bandwidth, which are not straight-
the choice of a maximum data rate Mb/s makes
forward to implement at low power. Moreover, wide pulse
the system compliant to the average power density limit
bandwidths may make the system more susceptible to interferers.
( 41.3 dBm/MHz) if the pulse energy is pJ.
Last, but not least, pulses with large energies may be difficult to
If the envelope of the pulse is Gaussian, then the transmitter
implement with the ultra-scaled CMOS technologies because
should be capable of delivering a peak-to-peak voltage swing
of the limited available supply voltage. Such technologies are
of about 3 V at the antenna input to meet the pJ
anyway necessary to keep the energy consumption and cost low,
specification. The circuit-level design of the transmitter and of
while enjoying good radio frequency circuit performance.
the matching network required to deliver a 3 V pulse to the
The key point in the system-level design is thus the choice
antenna with a supply voltage are discussed in
of the combination of transmitted pulse energy, modulation
Section III-A.
scheme and receiver noise performance to achieve a given
The relatively large value of allows the adoption
1Of course we have . of a simple pulse position modulation (PPM) scheme. Such
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1638 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 46, NO. 7, JULY 2011
TABLE I
LINK BUDGET OF THE PROPOSED SYSTEM
SOLDÀ et al.: A 5 Mb/s UWB-IR TRANSCEIVER FRONT-END FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS IN 0.13 m CMOS 1639
1640 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 46, NO. 7, JULY 2011
(3)
Fig. 6. Circuit schematic of MXR-PA.
SOLDÀ et al.: A 5 Mb/s UWB-IR TRANSCEIVER FRONT-END FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS IN 0.13 m CMOS 1641
leakage inductances of the transformer are used together with a concentric spiral winding layout in the thick top metal in order
the LNA RLC-series input impedance and the additional capac- to minimize the parasitic resistance that would be critical for
itor in parallel with the transformer primary coil to realize a noise. The simulated noise figure for the LNA and VGA cascade
wideband input matching network with a ladder topology [20]. is around 7 dB and is almost insensitive to the VGA gain setting.
The VGA, illustrated on the right side of Fig. 8, is realized as The nominal current consumption of the LNA and VGA is 1.25
the cascade of two differential common-source stages with an mA, plus an additional 0.25 mA for biasing.
LC resonant load. The two stages are stacked so that they reuse The circuit schematic of the squarer is reported on the left side
the same bias current. Gain programmability is implemented in of Fig. 9 [13], [21]. Although a passive mixer is sometimes pro-
the second stage by adding the two transistors and in posed to realize this block [3], in this case an active circuit has
parallel with the stage drivers and . and can been preferred in order to introduce some conversion gain. As-
be independently turned on by two digital control signals suming for simplicity an ideal long-channel current to voltage
and connected directly to their gates, thus subtracting bias characteristic, the differential input voltage can
current to the drivers and, consequently, reducing the stage gain. be expressed as
The resulting combined gain of the LNA and VGA cascade can
then be set to 30, 27, 23, or 21 dB. (4)
In order to save area, the VGA inductors layout has
been realized using stacked coils, as opposed to the inductors where , and are the electron mobility
and in the LNA, and the input transformer T, that feature and gate capacitance, respectively, is the form factor of
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1642 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 46, NO. 7, JULY 2011
(5)
(6)
(7)
Combining (6) and (7), the sum of the two drain currents be- Fig. 10. Micrograph of the chip. Die area is mm including the pads.
comes proportional to the square of the input signal, as reported
in (8):
these trade-offs, and a bias current budget lower than 1.5 mA,
(8) we set , and m m,
which approximately corresponds to .
Although (8) does not highlight any dependence on the bias cur- The current has to be integrated in order to detect the
rent , once an optimal current density for the transistors has energy received in a given time span. This operation is per-
been singled out, the squarer conversion gain results to be formed with the integrator shown on the right side of Fig. 9: it
proportional to the bias current , posing a design trade-off is composed of a cascode common-source amplifier acting as a
between gain and power consumption. Another critical issue transimpedance amplifier, with a capacitive feedback. During
from the perspective of power efficiency is the size of transis- the reset phase (signal is high), the integrating capacitors
tors and , which must be times larger than and are discharged and the amplifier sets its bias point. During
, consuming an times larger current. These transistors act phase , the current from the squarer flows through capacitor
as voltage followers: has to shift the source of and hence it is integrated over a time window of duration
by , hence the drain current of is proportional to ns; similarly, during phase the current is inte-
, squared. Notice that without the use of and grated on . Therefore the voltage difference stored on
the squarer topology would have to be a pseudo differential one, the capacitors is proportional to the differential energy received
making the circuit sensitive to common-mode disturbances at in the two time spans:
its input. Moreover, the drain current of each half circuit would
now be proportional to squared, with an overall decrease
by a factor 1/4 of the conversion gain for a given coefficient
in (8).
As discussed in more detail in [13], the transfer function from (10)
the gate of to its source is
where and are the received energy allocated in the time
window corresponding to a transmitted 1 and 0 respectively.
(9) Therefore a simple comparator driven by and can de-
tect which between and is largest and hence perform the
PPM demodulation. It is worth considering that after the squarer
the desired signal has been downconverted, therefore the band-
where is the total width specification for the integrator is less demanding than for
capacitance at the output node (source of ) and the other blocks in the front-end. Thus, a bias current as low as
. The pole in (9) must be at a higher frequency with 175 is enough.
respect to the upper limit of the signal bandwidth (i.e., 8.5 GHz),
in order to avoid an equivalent filtering effect on . Consid-
ering that, at fixed current density, , the larger IV. MEASUREMENT RESULTS
, the more the DC gain in (9) approximates unity, although A prototype of the transceiver was realized in a 0.13 m
this comes at the price of higher consumption. On the con- CMOS technology with 8 metal layers and thick top metal for
trary, the bandwidth is basically insensitive to , because both high-Q inductors. A micrograph of the chip is shown in Fig. 10.
and contain terms proportional to that Measurements on test structures revealed a transistor threshold
become dominant for values of greater than 3. Considering 22% higher than predicted by the foundry models in the worst
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SOLDÀ et al.: A 5 Mb/s UWB-IR TRANSCEIVER FRONT-END FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS IN 0.13 m CMOS 1643
of the TX. In our case, such a control has not been implemented:
a careful design supported by corner and Monte Carlo simula-
tions turned out to be sufficient, as shown by Fig. 12.
For testing purposes, the TX can be configured to generate
a continuous-wave output by locking the gate of in Fig. 6
to . This configuration allows to measure the tuning range
of the DCO and the continuous-wave power generated by the
TX. The result of the measurements is reported in Fig. 13: the
TX is able to output as much as 11.4 dBm over a 3-dB band-
width larger than 2 GHz; the carrier frequency can span from
6.6 to 9 GHz in 80 MHz steps, showing a 31% tuning range for
the DCO.
A performance comparison with other recent UWB-IR trans-
mitter designs is reported in Table II. A meaningful compar-
ison with other UWB-IR transmitters must include the pulse
Fig. 12. Measured PSD of a transmitted pulse train at MHz (dashed
line) and MHz (solid line); in the latter case the PSD is reported energy at the antenna, , since it is the parameter that sets
without (gray) or with (black) the scrambling operation enabled. the communication range for a given noise performance of the
receiver, as discussed in Section II. Unfortunately, most of the
papers on UWB-IR transmitters do not report the transmitted
case corner. As a consequence, the chip performance was as- pulse energy, and rather focus on the energy consumed to gen-
sessed at a voltage supply , that is 10% higher erate a pulse, . It is important to stress that, given two
than the nominal. transmitters with the same energy consumption, but different
A TX pulse waveform is reported in Fig. 11. The corre- efficiency , the one characterized by the largest can
sponding pulse energy is pJ, just 1.5 dB lower cover a given communication range with a less sensitive, and
than the target specification discussed in Section II-A, while thus less power hungry, receiver. In order to include in the
the total energy dissipated by the TX to generate the pulse comparison of UWB-IR transmitters, had to be estimated
is pJ/pulse. Thus the transmitter features an from the experimental data available in the papers. For [4]–[6],
efficiency . the transmitted pulse energy was derived based on the reported
The spectrum of a pulse train measured at MHz time domain pulse measurements. In [9]–[12], the PSD of the
(dashed line) and MHz (solid line) is reported in transmitted spectrum is shown. Thus, in this case, the pulse en-
Fig. 12. The expected PSD scaling with the PRF is clearly ob- ergy was obtained by integrating the PSD over the pulse band-
served. The spectrum measured at PRF=5 MHz is shown both in width, divided by the PRF at which the spectrum was mea-
the case the scrambling of the pulse polarity with a pseudo-noise sured. Table II shows that the presented design outperforms
sequence is disabled (solid grey trace) and when it is enabled state-of-the-art UWB-IR transmitters by a factor greater than 2
(solid black trace). In the latter case, the spectral lines typical of in terms of efficiency.
a periodic waveform disappear, and the PSD of the transmitted The RX input matching is shown in Fig. 14. The input re-
signal is compliant to the FCC mask limits with some margin. In flection coefficient is dB roughly between 7.1 and
a typical WSN, the data rate may be somewhere between 1 kb/s 8 GHz. Compared to simulations, the passband of the LNA
and 1 Mb/s. For such rates (or lower rates), the TX spectrum turned out to be shifted towards lower frequencies by about
is safely within the FCC mask. For higher rates, some form of 400 MHz. Consequently, the TX was also manually tuned down
power control loop could be required to enhance the robustness by 400 MHz during the tests.
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1644 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 46, NO. 7, JULY 2011
TABLE II
PERFORMANCE SUMMARY OF UWB-IR TRANSMITTERS
SOLDÀ et al.: A 5 Mb/s UWB-IR TRANSCEIVER FRONT-END FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS IN 0.13 m CMOS 1645
TABLE III
PERFORMANCE SUMMARY AND COMPARISON OF UWB-IR RX
Fig. 16. Measured BER at kb/s and at Mb/s. Fig. 17. Calculated receiver noise figure as a function of additional VGA gain
.
The measured receiver sensitivity dBm at maximum attainable data rate. Worse than that, the energy spent
kb/s implies a minimum energy of each received pulse by the link per bit would be 100 times higher. In general, the ap-
aJ, in excellent agreement with the circuit-level simulations proach of transmitting more pulses per bit does not seem to be
of the receiver. Given that the measured energy of the trans- an efficient one in terms of energy consumption, as this example
mitted pulse is pJ and that the antenna gain consid- illustrates.
ered in the link budget calculations (see Table I) is dB, To improve the communication range, a better approach
then a line-of-sight link of 3 m can be attained with a margin would be to decrease the receiver noise figure . As de-
of dB. As already mentioned, the communication tailed in the Appendix, the energy detector has a strong impact
range is independent of the actual data rate up to the maximum on , despite the LNA and VGA provide as much as
Mb/s allowed by the spectral regulations. 30 dB gain. Assuming to add another amplifier stage just after
the VGA without impairing the noise figure of the amplifier
V. FURTHER EXTENDING THE COMMUNICATION RANGE cascade, (13) and (14) can be used to find out the additional
As discussed in Section II and experimentally confirmed in gain required to lower the receiver noise figure by a given
Section IV, the proposed transceiver is tailored to cover a com- amount. The result is shown in Fig. 17: with dB the
munication range of 3 m. It is interesting, however, to investi- receiver noise figure is lowered by more than 10 dB, which is
gate ways to expand its operation range, e.g., to 10 m. the requirement for the communication range to be in excess of
One possibility of achieving this goal is to make use of some 10 m. The penalty in the receiver energy consumption due to
processing gain, that is to transmit multiple pulses per bit this additional block is estimated to be about 25%, which would
at the expense of a reduced data rate. If the received pulses are not sensibly impair the energy consumption performance of the
summed coherently before the demodulation is performed, a proposed transceiver.
processing gain as large as is achieved. However,
since in our receiver the ADC is substituted by a simple 1-bit VI. CONCLUSION
comparator, such an operation cannot be performed. A simple by A fully integrated UWB-IR CMOS transceiver front-end
majority decision rule can instead be applied to the demodulated is presented. The transmitter outputs Gaussian pulses with
pulses, yielding a reduced processing gain of . 2.2 V peak-to-peak amplitude, and 1.25 GHz bandwidth,
Thus, in our case would be needed to expand the corresponding to a transmitted energy of 13 pJ/pulse. The link
communication range to 10 m, with a strong decrease of the supports data rates up to 5 Mb/s covering ranges in excess
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1646 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 46, NO. 7, JULY 2011
(14)
SOLDÀ et al.: A 5 Mb/s UWB-IR TRANSCEIVER FRONT-END FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS IN 0.13 m CMOS 1647
[15] V. Sze, R. Blazquez, M. Bhardwaj, and A. Chandrakasan, “An en- Andrea Bevilacqua (S’02–M’05) received the
ergy efficient sub-threshold baseband processor architecture for pulsed Laurea and Ph.D. degrees in electronics engineering
ultra-wideband communications,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoustics, from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2000 and
Speech and Signal Processing, 2006, vol. 3, pp. 908–911. 2004, respectively.
[16] A. Gerosa, S. Soldà, A. Bevilacqua, D. Vogrig, and A. Neviani, “A From 1999 to 2000, he was an intern with Infi-
digitally programmable ring oscillator in the UWB range,” in Proc. neon Technologies, Munich, Germany. In 2001, he
IEEE Int. Symp. Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2010, pp. 1101–1104. visited the Microelectronics Laboratory of the Uni-
[17] I. Aoki, S. D. Kee, D. B. Rutledge, and A. Hajimiri, “Distributed active versity of Pavia, Italy. From 2002 to 2003, he was
transformer new power-combining and impedance-transformation a Visiting Scholar with the University of California,
technique,” IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 50, no. 1, pp. Berkeley. Presently, he is an Assistant Professor with
316–331, 2002. the Department of Information Engineering, Univer-
[18] S. S. Mohan, C. P. Yue, M. del Mar Hershenson, S. S. Wong, and T. sity of Padova, Italy. His current research interests include the design of RF/mi-
H. Lee, “Modeling and characterization of on-chip transformers,” in crowave integrated circuits and the analysis of radars and wireless communica-
IEEE Int. Electron Device Meeting (IEDM), 1998, pp. 531–534. tion systems.
[19] J. R. Long, “Monolithic transformers for silicon RF IC design,” IEEE Dr. Bevilacqua serves as a member of the Technical Program Committee of
J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 35, no. 9, pp. 1368–1382, 2000. the IEEE European Solid-State Circuits Conference and of the IEEE Interna-
[20] A. Vallese, A. Bevilacqua, C. Sandner, M. Tiebout, A. Gerosa, and A. tional Conference on Ultra-Wideband. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE
Neviani, “Analysis and design of an integrated notch filter for the re- TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS II.
jection of interference in UWB systems,” IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits,
vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 331–343, 2009.
[21] A. Demosthenous and M. Panovic, “Low-voltage MOS linear
transconductor/squarer and four-quadrant multiplier for analog Andrea Gerosa (M’99–SM’07) received the M.S.
VLSI,” IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I: Reg. Papers, vol. 52, no. 9, pp. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering in 1995
1721–1731, 2005. and 1998, respectively, from the University of
Padova, Italy, where he is now Associate Professor.
Dr. Gerosa is a senior member of the IEEE and
has published more than 70 papers in international
journals or conference proceedings. His performed
research activities are within the area of analog
and mixed integrated circuits, for high-frequency,
low-noise and low-power applications. Currently he
is working on UWB transceivers and radars.