Detailed Investigation of Ultra-Wideband Impulse Radio Communication Systems with LeCroy Oscilloscopes

I. OVERVIEW Target of the work is the evaluation of the potential of impulse radio (IR) communication systems with respect to commercial usage. Therefore a reconfigurable ultra-wideband (UWB) software defined radio (SDR) transmitter has been developed and the concept is presented in this application note. Besides common SDR concepts the developed IR transceiver employs first order bandpass (BP) sampling at a conversion frequency which is four times the sampling frequency. Hence signals can be directly generated in the radio frequency (RF) band avoiding any non–ideal mixer stages. Furthermore the requirements of the digital signal processing is significantly reduced. The transmitter consists basically of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and a high speed digital to analog converter (DAC) with 12 bit resolution. This design allows full flexibility and can be adaptively reconfigured in terms of modulation schemes, data rates, and channel equalization. The reconfigurable design will be used for an extensive performance analysis with respect to different modulation schemes, modulation techniques and bitrates required by a various number of applications.