Reconfigurable ultra-wideband transmitter for generation of arbitrary impulse shapes and modulation schemes

In this paper a reconfigurable ultra-wideband (UWB) impulse radio (IR) transmitter is presented. The IR signal is synthesized at an intermediate frequency (IF) by employing a multi-Nyquist digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with 12 bit resolution and an update rate of 2.3 GHz. Digital generation of signals in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) guarantees very high flexibility of the reconfigurable design. For upconversion to the radio frequency (RF) band, a first order bandpass (BP) sampling concept and an alternative conventional concept with mixer stages, have been realized. The system enables to generate signals with arbitrary modulation schemes and techniques at an external host personal computer (PC) employing MATLAB. Different measurements using a digitizing oscilloscope have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the transmitter.