Digital UWB Transmitter IC for IEEE 802.15.4a - IMEC

IMEC Announced a Digital UWB Transmitter IC for IEEE 802.15.4a transmitter standard. The IEEE 802.15.4a standardization committee proposed an alternative physical layer for ZigBee. It provides low power and scalable data range using UWB as key technology.

 IMEC designed the transmitter IC based on the signal structure depicted in the standard. The chip consists of a digitally-controlled oscillator, a programmable frequency divider, a unique digital RF modulator and an early-late detector for frequency calibration of the oscillator.

The oscillator produces carrier between 3 and 10GHz. The generated RF frequency is maintained by a phase-aligned FLL (Frequency Locked Loop) instead of a traditional PLL. This approach reduces the start-up time to only 2ns and reduces the signal duty cycle to only 3% resulting in less power consumption.

The transmitter has been designed in a 90nm digital CMOS technology with 1V power supply. Measurements on silicon show a power consumption for the transmitter of 0.65nJ per 16 chips burst (40pJ/pulse) at 3.5GHz carrier frequency and 1.4nJ per 16 chips burst (87pJ/pulse) at 10GHz. For the mandatory mode, this corresponds to 0.65mW to 1.4mW for 1Mbit/s data rate which outperforms state-of-the-art low-power narrowband transmitter implementations.

Source: IMEC