| Short-range wireless communications continually attract interest from both industry and academia, and it is changing our life in every aspect in the last decade. The design of wireless transceivers is the bottleneck for a variety applications, due to RF modeling inaccuracy, stringent FCC regulations over the transmitted power spectrum, interference, multi-path reflections, modulation scheme, receiver sensitivity, and synchronization. In addition, energy efficiency is always one of the most important design goals. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is found to be very energy-efficient due to its low duty cycle and potentially high data rate due to its wide bandwidth. However, there still remain unsolved issues with UWB transceivers, such as pulse shaping, multi-path reflections, and receiver clock synchronization.;To address these, novel techniques such as wireless multi-path equalization, pulse injection-locking for receiver clock synchronization, reconfigurable pulse shaping, low power wireless clock distribution, and an ultra-low-power superregenerative receiver are implemented and verified on silicon. Three chips are designed and verified: a 3--5GHz Impulse-Radio (IR) UWB transceiver, a 3--60GHz all digital reconfigurable transmitter, and a 402--405MHz MICS/UWB(Sub-GHz) super-regenerative receiver incorporating wireless clock synchronization. An detailed design methodology, measurement results, and discussions are presented. |
