A power efficient impulse generator for 6-9 GHz UWB applications

This article presents a VCO-based impulse generator, in which all circuit blocks are switched for low power consumption. A switching control pulse generator is employed for adjusting the impulse duration. The drive amplifier can generate triangular-like impulse with high amount of side-lobe rejection without any external filter. The experimental results show that the frequency range covers 6.5-9.3 GHz and 10-dB bandwidth is tunable from 0.5-2 GHz, while consuming only 39.6 pJ/pulse at 10 MHz pulse repetition frequency. The impulse generator is fabricated using a 0.13 mu m CMOS process and chip size is 1.07 x 1.50 mm(2) including ESD pads.