IMEC launches first digital UWB transmitter IC for IEEE 802.15.4a

(Product News, 15 Feb 2007)

IMEC has released what it claimed to be the first published IEEE 802.15.4a standard-compliant transmitter—its 90nm CMOS digital UWB transmitter—which is also said to outperform narrowband transmitter implementations. The transmitter covers the frequency bands of the standard up to 10GHz and is suited for application in low-power wireless sensor networks.

According to the company, the digitally controlled oscillator produces the RF carrier for all bands between 3GHz and 10GHz. The correct RF frequency is generated by a phase-aligned frequency locked loop instead of a traditional phase locked loop (PLL). This approach substantially reduces the start-up time to only 2ns and consequently reduces the signal duty cycle to only 3% resulting low power consumption. In addition, the technique also truncates the accumulative jitter process.

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 low-power narrowband transmitter implementations. The ultra-low power is obtained by switching off the entire transmitter between each burst and optimally exploiting the low power advantages of low duty-cycle communication.

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