Integrated circuits for ultra-wideband (UWB) radio

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology delivers very high data rates in excess of 100Mbps up to 1 Gbps, over a wide spectrum of frequency bands with very low power for short distances, results in a peaceful and less-interfering co-existence with other existed communication technologies. In short, the key benefits of UWB are; high data rates, ranging and communication application at the same time, low equipment cost, and immunity to multipath.; To best utilize across the entire UWB spectrum specified by FCC from 3.1GHz up to 10.6 GHz, it is very challenging to design of the RF front-end circuits, particularly in CMOS technology, due to wideband requirements of the transceiver's RF front-end. The RF front-end has to exhibit wideband characteristics of gain, noise figure, and linearity, as well as low power consumption. The scope of this dissertation is to design novel and innovative wideband RF front-ends for UWB transceivers using CMOS technology.; First a novel UWB mixer has been proposed and implemented in CMOS technology. Then a novel distributed RF front-end, incorporating composite cell of LNTA/mixer, for UWB applications, particularly dual conversion UWB receivers, has been presented. Furthermore a distributed direct conversion receiver (DDCR) for UWB radios has been proposed and implemented in CMOS technology. The novel distributed direct conversion receiver addresses the main issues of distributed circuits, namely high power consumption and large area and also it addresses the phase and gain mismatch problems in any direct conversion receivers. Moreover distributed active power combiners and splitters for multi-antenna UWB (MA-UWB) transceiver has been implemented in CMOS technology.; Finally a comprehensive analytical study of regenerative frequency dividers (RFD) has been presented. RFDs are essential blocks in the frequency synthesizers of the UWB transceivers. Two modes of operation; locked (stable) and quasi-locked, have been studied and the new derived characteristic differential equations (DE) which is a generalized form of Adler's equation, expresses the RFD behavior of these two modes.