A 90 nm CMOS 16 Gb/s Transceiver for Optical Interconnects

Interconnect architectures which leverage high-bandwidth optical channels offer a promising solution to address the increasing chip-to-chip I/O bandwidth demands. This paper describes a dense, high-speed, and low-power CMOS optical interconnect transceiver architecture. Vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) data rate is extended for a given average current and corresponding reliability level with a four-tap current summing FIR transmitter. A low-voltage integrating and double-sampling optical receiver front-end provides adequate sensitivity in a power efficient manner by avoiding linear high-gain elements common in conventional transimpedance-amplifier (TIA) receivers. Clock recovery is performed with a dual-loop architecture which employs baud-rate phase detection and feedback interpolation to achieve reduced power consumption, while high-precision phase spacing is ensured at both the transmitter and receiver through adjustable delay clock buffers. A prototype chip fabricated in 1 V 90 nm CMOS achieves 16 Gb/s operation while consuming 129 mW and occupying 0.105 mm^2

A review of advances in pixel detectors for experiments with high rate and radiation

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments ATLAS and CMS have established hybrid pixel detectors as the instrument of choice for particle tracking and vertexing in high rate and radiation environments, as they operate close to the LHC interaction points. With the High Luminosity-LHC upgrade now in sight, for which the tracking detectors will be completely replaced, new generations of pixel detectors are being devised. They have to address enormous challenges in terms of data throughput and radiation levels, ionizing and non-ionizing, that harm the sensing and readout parts of pixel detectors alike. Advances in microelectronics and microprocessing technologies now enable large scale detector designs with unprecedented performance in measurement precision (space and time), radiation hard sensors and readout chips, hybridization techniques, lightweight supports, and fully monolithic approaches to meet these challenges. This paper reviews the world-wide effort on these developments.Comment: 84 pages with 46 figures. Review article.For submission to Rep. Prog. Phy

High-Speed Low-Power Analog to Digital Converter for Digital Beam Forming Systems

abstract: Time-interleaved analog to digital converters (ADCs) have become critical components in high-speed communication systems. Consumers demands for smaller size, more bandwidth and more features from their communication systems have driven the market to use modern complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies with shorter channel-length transistors and hence a more compact design. Downscaling the supply voltage which is required in submicron technologies benefits digital circuits in terms of power and area. Designing accurate analog circuits, however becomes more challenging due to the less headroom. One way to overcome this problem is to use calibration to compensate for the loss of accuracy in analog circuits. Time-interleaving increases the effective data conversion rate in ADCs while keeping the circuit requirements the same. However, this technique needs special considerations as other design issues associated with using parallel identical channels emerge. The first and the most important is the practical issue of timing mismatch between channels, also called sample-time error, which can directly affect the performance of the ADC. Many techniques have been developed to tackle this issue both in analog and digital domains. Most of these techniques have high complexities especially when the number of channels exceeds 2 and some of them are only valid when input signal is a single tone sinusoidal which limits the application. This dissertation proposes a sample-time error calibration technique which bests the previous techniques in terms of simplicity, and also could be used with arbitrary input signals. A 12-bit 650 MSPS pipeline ADC with 1.5 GHz analog bandwidth for digital beam forming systems is designed in IBM 8HP BiCMOS 130 nm technology. A front-end sample-and-hold amplifier (SHA) was also designed to compare with an SHA-less design in terms of performance, power and area. Simulation results show that the proposed technique is able to improve the SNDR by 20 dB for a mismatch of 50% of the sampling period and up to 29 dB at 37% of the Nyquist frequency. The designed ADC consumes 122 mW in each channel and the clock generation circuit consumes 142 mW. The ADC achieves 68.4 dB SNDR for an input of 61 MHz.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

CMOS Signal Synthesizers for Emerging RF-to-Optical Applications

The need for clean and powerful signal generation is ubiquitous, with applications spanning the spectrum from RF to mm-Wave, to into and beyond the terahertz-gap. RF applications including mobile telephony and microprocessors have effectively harnessed mixed-signal integration in CMOS to realize robust on-chip signal sources calibrated against adverse ambient conditions. Combined with low cost and high yield, the CMOS component of hand-held devices costs a few cents per part per million parts. This low cost, and integrated digital processing, make CMOS an attractive option for applications like high-resolution imaging and ranging, and the emerging 5-G communication space. RADAR techniques when expanded to optical frequencies can enable micrometers of resolution for 3D imaging. These applications, however, impose upto 100x more exacting specifications on power and spectral purity at much higher frequencies than conventional RF synthesizers. This generation of applications will present unconventional challenges for transistor technologies - whether it is to squeeze performance in the conventionally used spectrum, already wrung dry, or signal generation and system design in the relatively emptier mm-Wave to sub-mmWave spectrum, much of the latter falling in the ``Terahertz Gap". Indeed, transistor scaling and innovative device physics leading to new transistor topologies have yielded higher cut-off frequencies in CMOS, though still lagging well behind SiGe and III-V semiconductors. To avoid multimodule solutions with functionality partitioned across different technologies, CMOS must be pushed out of its comfort zone, and technology scaling has to have accompanying breakthroughs in design approaches not only at the system but also at the block level. In this thesis, while not targeting a specific application, we seek to formulate the obstacles in synthesizing high frequency, high power and low noise signals in CMOS and construct a coherent design methodology to address them. Based on this, three novel prototypes to overcome the limiting factors in each case are presented. The first half of this thesis deals with high frequency signal synthesis and power generation in CMOS. Outside the range of frequencies where the transistor has gain, frequency generation necessitates harmonic extraction either as harmonic oscillators or as frequency multipliers. We augment the traditional maximum oscillation frequency metric (fmax), which only accounts for transistor losses, with passive component loss to derive an effective fmax metric. We then present a methodology for building oscillators at this fmax, the Maximum Gain Ring Oscillator. Next, we explore generating large signals beyond fmax through harmonic extraction in multipliers. Applying concepts of waveform shaping, we demonstrate a Power Mixer that engineers transistor nonlinearity by manipulating the amplitudes and relative phase shifts of different device nodes to maximize performance at a specific harmonic beyond device cut-off. The second half proposes a new architecture for an ultra-low noise phase-locked loop (PLL), the Reference-Sampling PLL. In conventional PLLs, a noisy buffer converts the slow, low-noise sine-wave reference signal to a jittery square-wave clock against which the phase of a noisy voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is corrected. We eliminate this reference buffer, and measure phase error by sampling the reference sine-wave with the 50x faster VCO waveform already available on chip, and selecting the relevant sample with voltage proportional to phase error. By avoiding the N-squared multiplication of the high-power reference buffer noise, and directly using voltage-mode phase error to control the VCO, we eliminate several noisy components in the controlling loop for ultra-low integrated jitter for a given power consumption. Further, isolation of the VCO tank from any varying load, unlike other contemporary divider-less PLL architectures, results in an architecture with record performance in the low-noise and low-spur space. We conclude with work that brings together concepts developed for clean, high-power signal generation towards a hybrid CMOS-Optical approach to Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) Light-Detection-And-Ranging (LIDAR). Cost-effective tunable lasers are temperature-sensitive and have nonlinear tuning profiles, rendering precise frequency modulations or 'chirps' untenable. Locking them to an electronic reference through an electro-optic PLL, and electronically calibrating the control signal for nonlinearity and ambient sensitivity, can make such chirps possible. Approaches that build on the body of advances in electrical PLLs to control the performance, and ease the specification on the design of optical systems are proposed. Eventually, we seek to leverage the twin advantages of silicon-intensive integration and low-cost high-yield towards developing a single-chip solution that uses on-chip signal processing and phased arrays to generate precise and robust chirps for an electronically-steerable fine LIDAR beam

메모리 인터페이스를 위한 4 레벨 펄스 진폭 변조 쿼터 레이트 수신기 설계

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2022. 8. 김수환.본 연구에서는 메모리 인터페이스를 위한 4 레벨 펄스 진폭 변조 (PAM-4) 수신기와 직교 클록을 생성하는 직교 신호 보정기를 제안된다. 데이터 센터에서 증가하는 IP 트래픽은 고속 및 저전력 메모리 인터페이스에 대한 수요를 증가시켜왔다. 이러한 요구를 만족시키기 위해 클럭 및 나이퀴스트 주파수를 높이지 않고도 데이터 전송률을 높일 수 있는 PAM-4 신호가 주목을 받고 있다. PAM-4 신호는 제로 비 복귀 신호 (NRZ) 보다 3배 낮은 수직 마진을 가지며, 이는 결정 피드백 이퀄라이저 내 슬라이스의 클럭-큐 딜레이를 증가시키며, 이로 인해 PAM-4 결정 피드백 이퀄라이저의 성능을 제한하는 요인이다. 본 연구에서는 인버터 기반의 합산기를 이용, 선택적으로 신호를 증폭시키는 결정 피드백 이퀄라이저를 사용함으로써 슬라이서의 전력 소모를 증가시키지 않으면서 슬라이서의 클럭-큐 딜레이를 줄일 수 있다. 또한, 적응형 지연 이득 컨트롤러를 포함하는 직교 신호 보정기는 높은 정확도와 빠른 스큐 보정으로 쿼드러처 클럭 간의 스큐를 교정할 수 있다. 선택적 눈 증폭 결정 피드백 이퀄라이저와 적응형 지연 이득 컨트롤러를 포함하는 직교 신호 보정기의 성능을 검증하기 위해 프로토타입 칩을 제작하였다. 제작된 칩은 65 nm CMOS 공정으로 제작되었다. 프로토타입 칩은 24 Gb/s/pin 에서 10-12 의 비트 에러율을 100 mUI 의 신호 너비로 달성하였다. 프로토타입 칩 내 PAM-4 수신기는 0.73 pJ/b 의 에너지 효율을 갖는다. 또한 적응형 지연 이득 컨트롤러를 포함하는 직교 신호 보정기는 3 GHz 쿼드러처 클럭 간 최대 21.2 ps 의 스큐를 0.8 ps 까지 줄일 수 있으며, 이 때 76.9 ns 의 교정 시간을 갖는다. 제안하는 직교 신호 보정기는 3 GHz 에서 2.15 mW/GHz 의 전력 효율을 갖는다.A four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) receiver, and a quadrature signal corrector (QSC) that generates quadrature clocks for memory interfaces is presented. Increasing IP traffic in data centers has increased the demand for high-speed and low-power memory interfaces. To satisfy this demand, PAM-4 signaling, which can increase data-rate without increasing clock and Nyquist frequency, is received considerable attention. PAM- signaling has vertical which three times lower than non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signaling, which makes the clock-to-Q delay of the slicer in the decision feedback equalizer (DFE) increases. This makes the DFE difficult to satisfy the timing constraint. In this paper, by using a DFE with inverter-based summers, the clock-to-Q delay of the slicer can be reduced without increasing the power consumption of the slicers. Also, the QSC using an adaptive delay gain controller can correct the skew between the quadrature clock with low skew and short correction time. The prototype receiver including the DFE with the inverter-based summer and the QSC using the adaptive delay gain controller was fabricated in 65 nm CMOS process. The prototype chip can achieve a bit error rate (BER) of 10-12 at 24 Gb/s/pin, and at this time, an eye width of 100 mUI is secured. The efficiency of the receiver is 0.73 pJ/b. In addition, the QSC cna reduce the maximum 21.2 ps of skew between 3 GHz quadrature clocks to 0.8 ps and has a correction time of 76.9 ns. The efficiency of the QSC is 2.15 mW/GHz.ABSTRACT 1 CONTENTS 3 LIST OF FIGURES 5 LIST OF TABLE 9 CHAPTER 1 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 MOTIVATION 1 1.2 PAM-4 SIGNALING 7 1.2.1 DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS ON PAM-4 RECEIVER 10 1.2.2 PRIOR WORKS 14 1.3 QUARTER-RATE ARCHITECTURE 18 1.3.1 DESIGN CONSIDERATION ON QUARTER-RATE ARCHITECTURE 20 1.3.2 PRIOR WORKS 25 1.4 SUMMARY 28 1.5 THESIS ORGANIZATION 30 CHAPTER 2 31 CONCEPTS OF DFE WITH INVERTER-BASED SUMMER 31 2.1 CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE OF DFE WITH INVERTER-BASED SUMMER 32 2.2 DESIGN CONSIDERATION OF INVERTER-BASED SUMMER 37 CHAPTER 3 41 CONCEPTS OF QUADRATURE SIGNAL CORRECTOR USING ADAPTIVE DELAY GAIN CONTROLLER 41 3.1 OPERATION OF PROPOSED QUADRATURE SIGNAL CORRECTOR 42 3.2 LOOP FILTER INCLUDING ADAPTIVE DELAY GAIN CONTROLLER 45 CHAPTER 4 48 ARCHITECTURE AND IMPLEMENTATION 48 4.1 OVERALL ARCHITECTURE 49 4.2 ANALOG FRONT END 52 4.3 DECISION FEEDBACK EQUALIZER WITH INVERTER-BASED SUMMER 54 4.4 CLOCK PATH 62 4.5 QUADRATURE SIGNAL CORRECTOR WITH ADAPTIVE DELAY GAIN CONTROLLER 63 CHAPTER 5 70 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 70 5.1 EXPERIMENTAL SETUP 70 5.2 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 74 5.2.1 MEASUREMENT RESULTS OF PAM-4 RECEIVER WITH DECISION FEEDBACK EQUALIZER USING INVERTER-BASED SUMMER 74 5.2.2 MEASUREMENT RESULTS OF QUADRATURE SIGNAL CORRECTOR USING ADAPTIVE DELAY GAIN CONTROLLER 77 CHAPTER 6 83 CONCLUSION 83 BIBLIOGRAPHY 86박

Development of a Waveform Sampling ASIC with Femtosecond Timing for a Low Occupancy Vertex Detector.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

Parametric analog signal amplification applied to nanoscale cmos wireless digital transceivers

Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Electrical and Computer Engineering by the Universidade Nova de Lisboa,Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaSignal amplification is required in almost every analog electronic system. However noise is also present, thus imposing limits to the overall circuit performance, e.g., on the sensitivity of the radio transceiver. This drawback has triggered a major research on the field, which has been producing several solutions to achieve amplification with minimum added noise. During the Fifties, an interesting out of mainstream path was followed which was based on variable reactance instead of resistance based amplifiers. The principle of these parametric circuits permits to achieve low noise amplifiers since the controlled variations of pure reactance elements is intrinsically noiseless. The amplification is based on a mixing effect which enables energy transfer from an AC pump source to other related signal frequencies. While the first implementations of these type of amplifiers were already available at that time, the discrete-time version only became visible more recently. This discrete-time version is a promising technique since it is well adapted to the mainstream nanoscale CMOS technology. The technique itself is based on the principle of changing the surface potential of the MOS device while maintaining the transistor gate in a floating state. In order words, the voltage amplification is achieved by changing the capacitance value while maintaining the total charge unchanged during an amplification phase. Since a parametric amplifier is not intrinsically dependent on the transconductance of the MOS transistor, it does not directly suffer from the intrinsic transconductance MOS gain issues verified in nanoscale MOS technologies. As a consequence, open-loop and opamp free structures can further emerge with this additional contribution. This thesis is dedicated to the analysis of parametric amplification with special emphasis on the MOS discrete-time implementation. The use of the latter is supported on the presentation of several circuits where the MOS Parametric Amplifier cell is well suited: small gain amplifier, comparator, discrete-time mixer and filter, and ADC. Relatively to the latter, a high speed time-interleaved pipeline ADC prototype is implemented in a,standard 130 nm CMOS digital technology from United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC). The ADC is fully based on parametric MOS amplification which means that one could achieve a compact and MOS-only implementation. Furthermore, any high speed opamp has not been used in the signal path, being all the amplification steps implemented with open-loop parametric MOS amplifiers. To the author’s knowledge, this is first reported pipeline ADC that extensively used the parametric amplification concept.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through the projects SPEED, LEADER and IMPAC

Low power VCO-based analog-to-digital conversion

textThis dissertation presents novel two stage ADC architecture with a VCO based second stage. With the scaling of the supply voltages in modern CMOS process it is difficult to design high gain operational amplifiers needed for traditional voltage domain two-stage analog to digital converters. However time resolution continues to improve with the advancement in CMOS technology making VCO-based ADC more attractive. The nonlinearity in voltage-to-frequency transfer function is the biggest challenge in design of VCO based ADC. The hybrid approach used in this work uses a voltage domain first stage to determine the most significant bits and uses a VCO based second stage to quantize the small residue obtained from first stage. The architecture relaxes the gain requirement on the the first stage opamp and also relaxes the linearity requirements on the second stage VCO. The prototype ADC built in 65nm CMOS process achieves 63.7dB SNDR in 10MHz bandwidth while only consuming 1.1mW of power. The performance of the prototype chip is comparable to the state-of-art in terms of figure-of-merit but this new architecture uses significantly less circuit area.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Design of Energy-Efficient A/D Converters with Partial Embedded Equalization for High-Speed Wireline Receiver Applications

As the data rates of wireline communication links increases, channel impairments such as skin effect, dielectric loss, fiber dispersion, reflections and cross-talk become more pronounced. This warrants more interest in analog-to-digital converter (ADC)-based serial link receivers, as they allow for more complex and flexible back-end digital signal processing (DSP) relative to binary or mixed-signal receivers. Utilizing this back-end DSP allows for complex digital equalization and more bandwidth-efficient modulation schemes, while also displaying reduced process/voltage/temperature (PVT) sensitivity. Furthermore, these architectures offer straightforward design translation and can directly leverage the area and power scaling offered by new CMOS technology nodes. However, the power consumption of the ADC front-end and subsequent digital signal processing is a major issue. Embedding partial equalization inside the front-end ADC can potentially result in lowering the complexity of back-end DSP and/or decreasing the ADC resolution requirement, which results in a more energy-effcient receiver. This dissertation presents efficient implementations for multi-GS/s time-interleaved ADCs with partial embedded equalization. First prototype details a 6b 1.6GS/s ADC with a novel embedded redundant-cycle 1-tap DFE structure in 90nm CMOS. The other two prototypes explain more complex 6b 10GS/s ADCs with efficiently embedded feed-forward equalization (FFE) and decision feedback equalization (DFE) in 65nm CMOS. Leveraging a time-interleaved successive approximation ADC architecture, new structures for embedded DFE and FFE are proposed with low power/area overhead. Measurement results over FR4 channels verify the effectiveness of proposed embedded equalization schemes. The comparison of fabricated prototypes against state-of-the-art general-purpose ADCs at similar speed/resolution range shows comparable performances, while the proposed architectures include embedded equalization as well

Simulation and Design of an UWB Imaging System for Breast Cancer Detection

Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer among women. In recent years, the mortality rate due to this disease is greatly decreased thanks to both enormous progress in cancer research, and screening campaigns which have allowed the increase in the number of early diagnoses of the disease. In fact, if the tumor is identied in its early stage, e.g. when it has a diameter of less than one centimeter, the possibility of a cure can reach 93%. However, statistics show that more young aged women are suered breast cancer. The goal of screening exams for early breast cancer detection is to nd cancers before they start to cause symptoms. Regular mass screening of all women at risk is a good option to achieve that. Instead of meeting very high diagnostic standards, it is expected to yield an early warning, not a denitive diagnosis. In the last decades, X-ray mammography is the most ecient screening technique. However, it uses ionizing radiation and, therefore, should not be used for frequent check-ups. Besides, it requires signicant breast compression, which is often painful. In this scenario many alternative technologies were developed to overcome the limitations of mammography. Among these possibilities, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is too expensive and time-consuming, Ultrasound is considered to be too operatordependent and low specicity, which are not suitable for mass screening. Microwave imaging techniques, especially Ultra WideBand (UWB) radar imaging, is the most interesting one. The reason of this interest relies on the fact that microwaves are non-ionizing thus permitting frequent examinations. Moreover, it is potentially lowcost and more ecient for young women. Since it has been demonstrated in the literatures that the dielectric constants between cancerous and healthy tissues are quite dierent, the technique consists in illuminating these biological tissues with microwave radiations by one or more antennas and analyzing the re ected signals. An UWB imaging system consists of transmitters, receivers and antennas for the RF part, the transmission channel and of a digital backend imaging unit for processing the received signals. When an UWB pulse strikes the breast, the pulse is re ected due to the dielectric discontinuity in tissues, the bigger the dierence, the bigger the backscatter. The re ected signals are acquired and processed to create the energy maps. This thesis aims to develop an UWB system at high resolution for the detection of carcinoma breast already in its initial phase. To favor the adoption of this method in screening campaigns, it is necessary to replace the expensive and bulky RF instrumentation used so far with ad-hoc designed circuits and systems. In order to realize that, at the very beginning, the overall system environment must be built and veried, which mainly consists of the transmission channel{the breast model and the imaging unit. The used transmission channel data come from MRI of the prone patient. In order to correctly use this numerical model, a simulator was built, which was implemented in Matlab, according to the Finite-Dierence-Time- Domain (FDTD) method. FDTD algorithm solves the electric and magnetic eld both in time and in space, thus, simulates the propagation of electromagnetic waves in the breast model. To better understand the eect of the system non-idealities, two 2D breast models are investigated, one is homogeneous, the other is heterogeneous. Moreover, the modeling takes into account all critical aspects, including stability and medium dispersion. Given the types of tissues under examination, the frequency dependence of tissue dielectric properties is incorporated into wideband FDTD simulations using Debye dispersion parameters. A performed further study is in the implementation of the boundary conditions. The Convolution Perfectly Matched Layer (CPML) is used to implement the absorbing boundaries. The objective of the imaging unit is to obtain an energy map representing the amount of energy re ected from each point of the breast, by recombining the sampled backscattered signals. For this purpose, the study has been carried out on various beamforming in the literature. The basic idea is called as "delay and sum", which is to align the received signals in such a way as to focus a given point in space and then add up all the contributions, so as to obtain a constructive interference at that point if this is a diseased tissue. In this work, Microwave Imaging via Space Time (MIST) Beamforming algorithm is applied, which is based on the above principle and add more elaborations of the signals in order to make the algorithm less sensitive to propagation phenomena in the medium and to the non-idealities of the system. It is divided into two distinct steps: the rst step, called SKin Artifact Removal (SKAR), takes care of removing the contributions from the signal caused by the direct path between the transmitter and receiver, the re ection of skin, as they are orders of magnitude higher compared to the re ections caused by cancers; the second step, which is BEAmForming (BEAF), performs the algorithm of reconstruction by forming a weighted combination of time delayed version of the calibrated re ected signals. As discussed above, more attention must be paid on the implementation of the ad-hoc integration circuits. In this scenario, due to the strict requirements on the RF receiver component, two dierent approaches of the implementation of the RF front-end, Direct Conversion (DC) receiver and Coherent Equivalent Time Sampling (CETS) receiver are compared. They are modeled behaviorally and the eects of various impairments, such as thermal, jitter, and phase noise, as well as phase inaccuracies, non-linearity, ADC quantization noise and distortion, on energy maps and on quantitative metrics such as SCR and SMR are evaluated. Dierential Gaussian pulse is chosen as the exciting source. Results show that DC receiver performs higher sensitivity to phase inaccuracies, which makes it less robust than the CETS receiver. Another advantage of the CETS receiver is that it can work in time domain with UWB pulses, other than in frequency domain with stepped frequency continuous waves like the DC one, which reduces the acquisition time without impacting the performance. Based on the results of the behavioral simulations, low noise amplier (LNA) and Track and Hold Amplier (THA) can be regarded as the most critical parts for the proposed CETS receiver, as well as the UWB antenna. This work therefore focuses on their hardware implementations. The LNA, which shows critical performance limitation at bandwidth and noise gure of receiver, has been developed based on common-gate conguration. And the THA based on Switched Source Follower (SSF) scheme has been presented and improved to obtain high input bandwidth, high sampling rate, high linearity and low power consumption. LNA and THA are implemented in CMOS 130nm technology and the circuit performance evaluation has been taken place separately and together. The small size UWB wide-slot antenna is designed and simulated in HFSS. Finally, in order to evaluate the eect of the implemented transistor level components on system performance, a multi-resolution top-down system methodology is applied. Therfore, the entire ow is analyzed for dierent levels of the RF frontend. Initially the system components are described behaviorally as ideal elements. The main activity consists in the analysis and development of the entire frontend system, observing and complementing each other blocks in a single ow simulation, clear and well-dened in its various interfaces. To achieve that the receiver is modeled and analyzed using VHDL-AMS language block by block, moreover, the impact of quantization, noise, jitter, and non-linearity is also evaluated. At last, the behavioral description of antenna, LNA and THA is replaced with a circuit-level one without changing the rest of the system, which permits a system-level assessment of low-level issues