Si/SiGe HBT UWB impulse generator tunable to FCC, ECC and Japanese spectral masks

In this paper a fully integrated, low power and differential ultra-wide band (UWB) impulse generator is presented. The proposed circuit uses an on-chip generated current spike to shortly switch on an LC oscillator. The configurable current spike width leads to a tunable duration of the generated impulses. The corresponding spectrum has a controllable 10 dB bandwidth thus fitting the spectral allocations in the USA, Europe and Japan. The realized circuit has a low power consumption of 6mW when targeting the FCC mask and of 10mW when targeting the ECC and Japanese masks at 100MHz output impulse repetition rate. This compact design occupies a chip size of 0.32 mm2 including bounding pads.