Miniaturization of UWB Antennas and its Influence on Antenna-Transceiver Performance in Impulse-UWB Communication

In this paper, a co-design methodology and the effect of antenna miniaturization in an impulse UWB system/transceiver is presented. Modified small-size printed tapered monopole antennas (PTMA) are designed in different scaling sizes. In order to evaluate the performance and functionality of these antennas, the effect of each antenna is studied in a given impulse UWB system. The UWB system includes an impulse UWB transmitter and two kinds of UWB receivers are considered, one based on correlation detection and one on energy detection schemes. A tunable low-power Impulse UWB transmitter is designed and the benefit of co-designing it with the PTMA antenna is investigated for the 3.1–10.6 GHz band. A comparison is given between a 50 $Omega $ design and a co-designed version. Our antenna/transceiver co-design methodology shows improvement in both transmitter efficiency and whole system performance. The simulation results show that the PTMA antenna and its miniaturized geometries are suitable for UWB applications.