The concept of ultra wideband impulse radio has interesting properties.
The wide transmission band makes penetration through different ma
terials better than narrow band transmission. The lack of carrier may
be traded for low power solutions provided a power efficient receiver
may be implemented. Unlike narrow band radio, demanding statistical
computation must be carried out. This is often done in a parallel archi
tecture. Although several portable applications are striving for higher
bandwidth, there is an increasing demand for shortrange low bandwidth
mobile communication units. In several of these applications ultra low
power is important. In addition other properties of impulse radio trans
missions may be appreciated such as interference immunity and penet
ration.
The purpose of this thesis is to explore a lowpower solution for correlator
based impulse radio receivers. A mixedmode parallel RAKE structure is
realized in a standard 0.12 m CMOS technology. The receiver is imple
mented as a RAKE structure combining digital shift registers with analog
computation in a series of parallel taps of a synchronizing delay line. In
each parallel bit stream the incoming signal is crosscorrelated with a
stored template. By combining a delay line and a mixedmode correl
ator we can explore multipath reflections in a time domain statistical
computation for symbol recovery. Simulations are presented showing
promising results with regard to power consumption and overall func
tionality. Measurements are performed conforming the basic functional
ity of the circuit