Ultra-wideband Access to Broadband Internet

The next explosive growth of Internet will come from connecting to billions (or even trillions) of cheap, low power sensors, effectors, and smart devices. In all these scenarios, the transformative benefits from connecting to the Internet happen when such telemetric systems are mobile and/or on our persons, children, pets, etc. The unstated assumption of this vision is that there will be wireless transceivers suitable for connecting to small, cheap, ubiquitous devices, which are battery powered and can operate unattended for weeks, months, or years. We claim that integrated CMOS ultrawideband (UWB) transceivers with precise 3-D position location capability are the enabling technology for this "finest-grained" networking of ubiquitous sensors, effectors, and smart devices.
The UWB signals consist of multiple narrow pulses with the pulse width in the order of subnanosecond. These baseband signals occupy the spectrum in the GHz range without any carrier frequency. Gigahertz bandwidth gives centimeter range resolution for position location, the possibility of high data rate, and the ability to resolve multipath
signals. Operation at low frequencies gives the ability to penetrate walls, and to use slower, cheaper (i.e. CMOS) circuits. In addition, UWB signals do not suffer from the deep fading nulls (~30 dB) that plague sinewave-based signals in the presence of multipath.
Unlike sinewave frequency-based RF components requiring multiple technologies (discrete, GaAs, bipolar and CMOS) which makes it extremely difficult to integrate on a single chip, the entire UWB transceiver can be integrated with a single CMOS implementation. Single chip CMOS integration of UWB transceiver contributes directly to low cost, small size, and low power. Extremely low power consumption comes from well established low power design methodologies available for CMOS and low duty-cycle episodic transmissions. In addition, as we have learned from our previous design experiences, we can further reduce power consumption up to a factor of 100 by exploring system level architecture where massive parallelism is achieved using the direct-map strategy.
Our proposed research is a collaborative effort between U.C. Berkeley and Aether Wire & Location, Inc. (www.aetherwire.com). The key contributions of this project will be design of a UWB sensor network that provides extremely fine-grained locationing capabilities (in the order of centimeters); to investigate network protocols and algorithms for energy efficient communication that alleviates "hot spots" in a low data rate multi-hop UWB sensor network; to investigate technologies for the last 10-meter in-building connections; design and implementation of a low cost UWB transceiver using highly integrated CMOS technology; and, to provide a system architecture that meets the lowest power energy constraint of sensor nodes.