A high-speed circuit architecture for IR-UWB transmission of fast-scan cyclic voltammetry in 0.35 εm CMOS

This paper reports on the design of a high-speed circuit for impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transmission of 16-channel neurochemical activity recorded using 300-V/s fast-scan cyclic voltammetry (FSCV). Simulated in a low-cost 0.35-εm standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, the circuit generates 3(rd)-derivative Gaussian pulses with sub-nanosecond duration, which are highpass filtered externally using a 4(th)-order Butterworth filter before feeding to an off-chip UWB antenna. The power spectral density (PSD) achieves a peak emission frequency of 4.6 GHz with a 2.3-GHz bandwidth (-10 dB), and is fully compliant with the UWB emission mask. The energy efficiency in pulse generation is 161.7 pJ/pulse that leads to a power consumption of 4.85 mW from 3.3 V for a data rate of 15 Mbps, when two pulses are used to transmit a single data bit.