Analysis and comparison between impulse and multiband ultrawide bandwidth communication systems

Until recently Ultra-wide Bandwidth (UWB) technology was restricted to military communication systems. However, after the FCC landmark decision of February 2002 to open up 7.5GHz of bandwidth to use by unlicensed UWB devices, there has been increased interest in this technology. The motivation behind this change is the unique capabilities of UWB compared to traditional narrowband RF systems. Today, after years of research and development by companies and universities UWB technology deployment is at a crossroads between the traditional impulse radio UWB approach and the OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) UWB approach. Only one of these approaches is going to be adopted by IEEE for standardization. Two proposals representing both approaches are being considered by IEEE, one led by Texas Instruments based on OFDM-UWB and the other led by Motorola based on IR-UWB.; In this thesis we provide analysis and comparison between these two approaches by simulating each one of them using MATLAB. We first simulate the general IR-UWB communication system and then the specific Motorola IEEE physical layer. Second we simulate the general OFDM-UWB communication system and the specific physical layer of Texas Instruments IEEE proposal. The motivation behind studying the general cases of the technology as well as the specific proposals is to provide our Analog and Mixed Signal IC (AMIC) design research lab with a tool to help us determine which UWB technology to adopt in our design of a UWB transceiver IC.