Amplification of ultrawideband signals

Abstract

One of the main implementation challenges in the ultrawideband (UWB) radio is the design of efficient amplifiers. The difficulty in amplifying an UWB signal stems from its bandwidth being a large fraction of the amplifier gain-bandwidth product. This paper describes a methodology and the tradeoffs associated with the design of UWB amplifiers. The amplifiers are designed to minimize a new performance metric, which we refer to as the effective noise figure (NF). The effective NF measures the degradation caused by the amplifier in the achievable receiver performance after the digital decoding process, which is ultimately the most relevant measure of performance.