An all-digital transmitter for pulsed ultra-wideband communication

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-96).Applications like sensor networks, medical monitoring, and asset tracking have led to a demand for energy-efficient and low-cost wireless transceivers. These types of applications typically require low effective data rates, thus providing an opportunity to employ simple modulation schemes and aggressive duty-cycling. Due to their inherently duty-cycled nature, pulse-based Ultra-Wideband (UWB) systems are amenable to low-power operation by shutting off circuitry during idle mode between pulses. Furthermore, the use of non-coherent UWB signaling greatly simplifies both transmitter and receiver implementations, offering additional energy savings. This thesis presents an all-digital transmitter designed for a non-coherent pulsed UWB system. By exploiting relaxed center frequency tolerances in non-coherent wideband communication, the transmitter synthesizes UWB pulses from an energy efficient, single-ended digital ring oscillator. Dual capacitively-coupled digital power amplifiers (PAs) are used in tandem to generate bipolar phase modulated pulses for spectral scrambling purposes. By maintaining opposite common modes at the output of these PAs during idle mode (i.e. when no pulses are being transmitted), low frequency turn-on and turn-off transients typically associated with single-ended digital circuits driving single-ended antennas are attenuated by up to 12dB. Furthermore, four level digital pulse shaping is employed to attenuate RF side lobes by up to 20dB. The resulting dual power amplifiers achieve FCC compliant operation in the 3.5, 4.0, and 4.5GHz IEEE 802.15.4a bands without the use of any off-chip filters or large passive components. The transmitter is fabricated in a 90nm CMOS process and requires a core area of 0.07mm2. The entirely digital architecture consumes zero static bias current, resulting in an energy efficiency of 17.5pJ/pulse at data rates up to 15.6Mbps.by Patrick Philip Mercier.S.M

Ultra-Wideband CMOS Transceiver Front-End for Bio-Medical Radar Sensing

Since the Federal Communication Commission released the unlicensed 3.1-10.6 GHz frequency band for commercial use in early 2002, the ultra wideband (UWB) has developed from an emerging technology into a mainstream research area. The UWB technology, which utilizes wide spectrum, opens a new era of possibility for practical applications in radar sensing, one of which is the human vital sign monitoring. The aim of this thesis is to study and research the possibility of a new generation humanrespiration monitoring sensor using UWB radar technology and to develop a new prototype of UWB radar sensor for system-on-chip solutions in CMOS technology. In this thesis, a lowpower Gaussian impulse UWB mono-static radar transceiver architecture is presented. The UWB Gaussian pulse transmitter and receiver are implemented and fabricated using 90nm CMOS technology. Since the energy of low order Gaussian pulse is mostly condensed at lower frequency, in order to transmit the pulse in a very efficient way, higher order Gaussian derivative pulses are desired as the baseband signal. This motivates the advancement of the design into UWB high-order pulse transmitter. Both the Gaussian impulse UWB transmitter and Gaussian higher-order impulse UWB transmitter take the low-power and high-speed advantage of digital circuit to generate different waveforms. The measurement results are analyzed and discussed. This thesis also presents a low-power UWB mono-static radar transceiver architecture exploiting the full benefit of UWB bandwidth in radar sensing applications. The transceiver includes a full UWB band transmitter, an UWB receiver front-end, and an on-chip diplexer. The non-coherent UWB transmitter generates pulse modulated baseband signals at different carrier frequencies within the designated 3-10 GHz band using a digitally controlled pulse generator. The test shows the proposed radar transceiver can detect the human respiration pattern within 50 cm distance. The applications of this UWB radar sensing solution in commercialized standard CMOS technology include constant breathing pattern monitoring for gated radiation therapy, realtime monitoring of patients, and any other breathing monitoring. The research paves the way to wireless technology integration with health care and bio-sensor network

Ultra-Low-Power Uwb Impulse Radio Design: Architecture, Circuits, And Applications

Recent advances in home healthcare, environmental sensing, and low power computing have created a need for wireless communication at very low power for low data rate applications. Due to higher energy/bit requirements at lower data -rate, achieving power levels low enough to enable long battery lifetime (~10 years) or power-harvesting supplies have not been possible with traditional approaches. Dutycycled radios have often been proposed in literature as a solution for such applications due to their ability to shut off the static power consumption at low data rates. While earlier radio nodes for such systems have been proposed based on a type of sleepwake scheduling, such implementations are still power hungry due to large synchronization uncertainty (~1[MICRO SIGN]s). In this dissertation, we utilize impulsive signaling and a pulse-coupled oscillator (PCO) based synchronization scheme to facilitate a globally synchronized wireless network. We have modeled this network over a widely varying parameter space and found that it is capable of reducing system cost as well as providing scalability in wireless sensor networks. Based on this scheme, we implemented an FCC compliant, 3-5GHz, timemultiplexed, dual-band UWB impulse radio transceiver, measured to consume only 20[MICRO SIGN]W when the nodes are synchronized for peer-peer communication. At the system level the design was measured to consume 86[MICRO SIGN]W of power, while facilitating multi- hop communication. Simple pulse-shaping circuitry ensures spectral efficiency, FCC compliance and ~30dB band-isolation. Similarly, the band-switchable, ~2ns turn-on receiver implements a non-coherent pulse detection scheme that facilitates low power consumption with -87dBm sensitivity at 100Kbps. Once synchronized the nodes exchange information while duty-cycling, and can use any type of high level network protocols utilized in packet based communication. For robust network performance, a localized synchronization detection scheme based on relative timing and statistics of the PCO firing and the timing pulses ("sync") is reported. No active hand-shaking is required for nodes to detect synchronization. A self-reinforcement scheme also helps maintain synchronization even in the presence of miss-detections. Finally we discuss unique ways to exploit properties of pulse coupled oscillator networks to realize novel low power event communication, prioritization, localization and immediate neighborhood validation for low power wireless sensor applications

LOW-POWER IMPULSE-RADIO ULTRA-WIDEBAND TECHNIQUES FOR BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS.

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Digital ADCs and ultra-wideband RF circuits for energy constrained wireless applications by Denis Clarke Daly.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-183).Ongoing advances in semiconductor technology have enabled a multitude of portable, low power devices like cellular phones and wireless sensors. Most recently, as transistor device geometries reach the nanometer scale, transistor characteristics have changed so dramatically that many traditional circuits and architectures are no longer optimal and/or feasible. As a solution, much research has focused on developing 'highly digital' circuits and architectures that are tolerant of the increased leakage, variation and degraded voltage headrooms associated with advanced CMOS processes. This thesis presents several highly digital, mixed-signal circuits and architectures designed for energy constrained wireless applications. First, as a case study, a highly digital, voltage scalable flash ADC is presented. The flash ADC, implemented in 0.18 [mu]m CMOS, leverages redundancy and calibration to achieve robust operation at supply voltages from 0.2 V to 0.9 V. Next, the thesis expands in scope to describe a pulsed, noncoherent ultra-wideband transceiver chipset, implemented in 90 nm CMOS and operating in the 3-to-5 GHz band. The all-digital transmitter employs capacitive combining and pulse shaping in the power amplifier to meet the FCC spectral mask without any off-chip filters. The noncoherent receiver system-on-chip achieves both energy efficiency and high performance by employing simple amplifier and ADC structures combined with extensive digital calibration. Finally, the transceiver chipset is integrated in a complete system for wireless insect flight control.(cont.) Through the use of a flexible PCB and 3D die stacking, the total weight of the electronics is kept to 1 g, within the carrying capacity of an adult Manduca sexta moth. Preliminary wireless flight control of a moth in a wind tunnel is demonstrated.Ph.D

Energy-efficient, short-range ultra-wideband radio transceivers

Short-range wireless communications continually attract interest from both industry and academia, and it is changing our life in every aspect in the last decade. The design of wireless transceivers is the bottleneck for variety applications, due to RF modeling inaccuracy, stringent FCC regulations over the transmitted power spectrum, interference, multi-path reflections, modulation scheme, receiver sensitivity, and synchronization. In addition, energy efficiency is always one of the most important design goals. Ultra-Wideband(UWB) is found to be very energy-efficient due to its low duty cycle and potentially high data rate due to its wide bandwidth. However, there still remain unsolved issues with UWB transceivers, such as pulse shaping, multi-path reflections, and receiver clock synchronization. To address these, novel techniques such as wireless multi-path equalization, pulse injection-locking for receiver clock synchronization, reconfigurable pulse shaping, low power wireless clock distribution, and an ultra-low-power super-regenerative receiver are implemented and verified on silicon. Three chips are designed and verified: a 3-5GHz Impulse-Radio(IR) UWB transceiver, a 3-60GHz all digital reconfigurable transmitter, and a 402-405MHz MICS/UWB(Sub-GHz) super-regenerative receiver incorporating wireless clock synchronization. A detailed design methodology, measurement results, and discussions are presented

Design and Implementation of a Low‐Power Wireless Respiration Monitoring Sensor

Wireless devices for monitoring of respiration activities can play a major role in advancing modern home-based health care applications. Existing methods for respiration monitoring require special algorithms and high precision filters to eliminate noise and other motion artifacts. These necessitate additional power consuming circuitry for further signal conditioning. This dissertation is particularly focused on a novel approach of respiration monitoring based on a PVDF-based pyroelectric transducer. Low-power, low-noise, and fully integrated charge amplifiers are designed to serve as the front-end amplifier of the sensor to efficiently convert the charge generated by the transducer into a proportional voltage signal. To transmit the respiration data wirelessly, a lowpower transmitter design is crucial. This energy constraint motivates the exploration of the design of a duty-cycled transmitter, where the radio is designed to be turned off most of the time and turned on only for a short duration of time. Due to its inherent duty-cycled nature, impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transmitter is an ideal candidate for the implementation of a duty-cycled radio. To achieve better energy efficiency and longer battery lifetime a low-power low-complexity OOK (on-off keying) based impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transmitter is designed and implemented using standard CMOS process. Initial simulation and test results exhibit a promising advancement towards the development of an energy-efficient wireless sensor for monitoring of respiration activities

High Performance RF and Basdband Analog-to-Digital Interface for Multi-standard/Wideband Applications

The prevalence of wireless standards and the introduction of dynamic standards/applications, such as software-defined radio, necessitate the next generation wireless devices that integrate multiple standards in a single chip-set to support a variety of services. To reduce the cost and area of such multi-standard handheld devices, reconfigurability is desirable, and the hardware should be shared/reused as much as possible. This research proposes several novel circuit topologies that can meet various specifications with minimum cost, which are suited for multi-standard applications. This doctoral study has two separate contributions: 1. The low noise amplifier (LNA) for the RF front-end; and 2. The analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The first part of this dissertation focuses on LNA noise reduction and linearization techniques where two novel LNAs are designed, taped out, and measured. The first LNA, implemented in TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) 0.35Cm CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) process, strategically combined an inductor connected at the gate of the cascode transistor and the capacitive cross-coupling to reduce the noise and nonlinearity contributions of the cascode transistors. The proposed technique reduces LNA NF by 0.35 dB at 2.2 GHz and increases its IIP3 and voltage gain by 2.35 dBm and 2dB respectively, without a compromise on power consumption. The second LNA, implemented in UMC (United Microelectronics Corporation) 0.13Cm CMOS process, features a practical linearization technique for high-frequency wideband applications using an active nonlinear resistor, which obtains a robust linearity improvement over process and temperature variations. The proposed linearization method is experimentally demonstrated to improve the IIP3 by 3.5 to 9 dB over a 2.5–10 GHz frequency range. A comparison of measurement results with the prior published state-of-art Ultra-Wideband (UWB) LNAs shows that the proposed linearized UWB LNA achieves excellent linearity with much less power than previously published works. The second part of this dissertation developed a reconfigurable ADC for multistandard receiver and video processors. Typical ADCs are power optimized for only one operating speed, while a reconfigurable ADC can scale its power at different speeds, enabling minimal power consumption over a broad range of sampling rates. A novel ADC architecture is proposed for programming the sampling rate with constant biasing current and single clock. The ADC was designed and fabricated using UMC 90nm CMOS process and featured good power scalability and simplified system design. The programmable speed range covers all the video formats and most of the wireless communication standards, while achieving comparable Figure-of-Merit with customized ADCs at each performance node. Since bias current is kept constant, the reconfigurable ADC is more robust and reliable than the previous published works