Ultra wideband preliminaries

“Ultra-wideband technology holds great promise for a vast array of new applications that have the potential to provide significant benefits for public safety, businesses and consumers in a variety of applications such as radar imaging of objects buried under the ground or behind walls and shortrange, high-speed data transmission”[FCC,2002] This quote focuses the level of importance of UWB technology as its applications are various. The FCC outlined possible applications of this technology such as imaging systems, ground penetrating radar (GPR) systems, wall-imaging systems, through-wall imaging systems, medical systems, surveillance systems, vehicular radar systems and communications and measurements systems. The spectrum allocation for UWB is in the range from 1.99 GHz10.6 GHz, 3.1 GHz10.6 GHz, or below 960 MHz depending on the particular application [FCC,2002]. The global interest in this technology is huge especially in communications environment due to the potential delivery of ultra high speed data transmission, coexistence with existing electrical systems (due to the extremely low power spectrum density) with low power consumption using a low cost one-chip implementation. There are many advantages and benefits of UWB systems as shown in Table 1 over narrowband technologies. Therefore, with the approval of FCC regulations for UWB, several universities and companies have jumped into the realm of UWB research [Nokia, 2006].