Low-Power Impulse UWB Architectures and Circuits Pulsed ultrawide band provides the energy needed for a high data-rate battery-operated transceiver, and a low data-rate transceiver suitable for battery-less operation

Ultra-wide-band (UWB) communication has a variety of applications ranging from wireless USB to radio- frequency (RF) identification tags. For many of these applica- tions, energy is critical due to the fact that the radios are situated on battery-operated or even batteryless devices. Two custom low-power impulse UWB systems are presented in this paper that address high- and low-data-rate applications. Both systems utilize energy-efficient architectures and circuits. The high-rate system leverages parallelism to enable the use of energy-efficient architectures and aggressive voltage scaling down to 0.4 V while maintaining a rate of 100 Mb/s. The low- rate system has an all digital transmitter architecture, 0.65 and 0.5 V radio-frequency (RF) and analog circuits in the receiver, and no RF local oscillators, allowing the chipset to power on in 2 ns for highly duty-cycled operation.