Design of a 3–7GHz Clockless Self-Mixing IR-UWB Receiver Front-End With a Sub-10-Ps TDC

This paper presents a non-coherent self-mixing front-end circuit designed for a clockless, low-power, wideband impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) receiver. The design features a transformer-based low-noise amplifier (LNA) that enhances the gain and the bandwidth through$\boldsymbol {g_{m}}$-boost and magnetic coupling techniques, followed by a shunt-peaked radio-frequency amplifier (RFA) for further band extension, and a compact self-mixer for envelope detection. To support hybrid high-order demodulation, a two-stage time-to-digital converter (TDC) with sub-10-ps resolution extracts both the rising and falling edges of the received pulses after evelope detection and comparison. The proposed design was fabricated in 40-nm CMOS technology, achieving sensitivities of -64 dBm at 1.344 Gb/s and -55 dBm at 2.016 Gb/s, an energy efficiency of 6.7 pJ/bit, a power consumption of 13.62 mW, occupying an active core area of$0.376~\text {mm}^{2}$.