ISSCC 2007 / SESSION 6 / UWB and mm - WAVE COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS / 6 . 3 6 . 3 A 2 . 5 nJ / b 0 . 65 V 3 - to - 5 GHz Subbanded UWB Receiver

With portable electronics and wireless sensor networks becoming increasingly pervasive, energy efficient radios have become an active area of research [1-3]. A critical figure of merit (FOM) for measuring radio efficiency in such applications is energy per bit. Though sub-nJ/b data reception is achievable for data rates >100Mb/s using optimized coherent architectures [4], there is a need for simple, low-cost, low-power, and scalable radios as specified in the IEEE 802.15.4a standard [5]. This work explores the unique properties of FCC-compliant pulsed UWB signals and scaled CMOS devices to improve energy per bit of existing lowdata-rate GHz-range integrated radios.