High-Sensitivity, Low-Power IR-UWB Radar Transceiver With Self-Interference Resistance for Child Presence Detection and Precision Positioning

This article presents a radar-enabled impulse radio ultrawideband (IR-UWB) system by adopting a self-interference-resistant RF transceiver. It demonstrates that child presence detection (CPD) using IR-UWB radar is feasible through the implementation of a radar system that includes physical (PHY), media access control (MAC), and application (APP) processors. The RF transceiver shows high receiver (RX) sensitivity and high transmitter (TX) peak power with low power. In addition, a radar-dedicated TX is used to improve the TX signal isolation to the RX. To achieve the high RX chain gain and low noise figure (NF) of RX, an RX front end (RX-FE) [low-noise amplifier (LNA) and voltage-to-current (V2I)] with a 50% duty cycle local oscillator (LO) is implemented. Furthermore, a notch pulse shaping filter (PSF) technique is proposed to meet spectrum emission mask (SEM) specifications with low power consumption. An LNA with wide gain ranges is also proposed to improve the sensitivity and support various applications related to radar and positioning applications. The UWB transceiver achieves −96.5-dBm sensitivity at BPRF 6.81 Mb/s and 14-dBm TX peak power and supports radar operation with UWB channels 5 and 9.