Impulse-based ultra-wide-band (UWB) radio systems and applications June 4, 2008

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Google Tech Talks
May 22, 2008

ABSTRACT

The old idea of impulse radio dates back to Marconi's first wireless transmissions using sparks. Unlike
most wireless today, impulse radio transmissions are extremely wideband signals. The recently FCC-
released frequency band from 3.1GHz to 10.6GHz is the widest unlicensed frequency band ever released (7.5GHz). This ultra wide bandwidth (UWB) is commercially explored for even faster data transfer using traditional, multi-band (OFDM) RF techniques. However, the available bandwidth is wide enough for impulse radio transmission giving new functionality and new implementation challenges.

In this talk I will show how power efficient impulse radio solutions are feasible in standard digital CMOS
technology. Quite non-standard and untraditional design strategies must be used including time-domain
signal processing. Circuit topologies for higher order Gaussian pulse generation and power efficient,
correlating RAKE receivers will be explained. Impulse radio transmissions have additional interesting properties compared to narrowband modulation.

With time-domain processing (TDOA) highly accurate positioning is feasible in the millimeter range. Improved sensitivity for robust communication. Large number of channels (greater than 100).

Novel applications are also feasible using impulse transmission. Combining novel design techniques like
"Swept-Threshold sampling" and digital lossless integration, micropower impulse radar is feasible in
CMOS. A 60GHz sampler is used to accumulate and recover reflected electromagnetic energy. These
new sensing devices (medical radar) may be explored for reading vital body signs (pulse, breathing, blood pressure?) embedded in your car seat or hospital emergency bed (detached sensor). Just imagine what you can do looking though heavy matter! Single chip CMOS impulse radar will be demonstrated at the end of the talk.

Speaker: Tor Sverre Lande
Tor Sverre (Bassen) Lande is a professor in Microelectronics at the Dept. of Informatics, Univ. of Oslo. From 2004 he is also serving as visiting professor at Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Imperial College, London, UK. His primary research is related to microelectronics, both digital and analog. Research fields are Neuromorphic Engineering, analog signal processing, micropower circuit design, biomedical circuits and systems and impulse radio. He is the author or co-author of more than 90 scientific publications with chapters in two books.