Design and analysis of an energy-efficient O-QPSK coherent IR-UWB transceiver with a 0.52° RMS phase-noise fractional synthesizer

This paper explores an energy-efficient pulsed ultra-wideband (UWB) radio-frequency (RF) front-end chip fabricated in 0.18-μm CMOS technology,including a transmitter,receiver,and fractional synthesizer.The transmitter adopts a digital offset quadrature phase-shift keying (O-QPSK) modulator and passive direct-phase multiplexing technology,which are energy-and hardware-efficient,to enhance the data rate for a given spectrum.A passive mixer and a capacitor cross-coupled (CCC) source-follower driving amplifier (DA) are also designed for the transmitter to further reduce the low power consumption.For the receiver,a power-aware low-noise amplifier (LNA) and a quadrature mixer are applied.The LNA adopts a CCC boost common-gate amplifier as the input stage,and its current is reused for the second stage to save power.The mixer uses a shared amplification stage for the following passive IQ mixer.Phase noise suppression of the phase-locked loop (PLL) is achieved by utilizing an even-harmonics-nulled series-coupled quadrature oscillator (QVCO) and an in-band noise-aware charge pump (CP) design.The transceiver achieves a measured data rate of 0.8 Gbps with power consumption of 16 mW and 31.5 mW for the transmitter and the receiver,respectively.The optimized integrated phase noise of the PLL is 0.52° at 4.025 GHz.