Ultra-Wideband Communications: Fundamentals and Applications

2.1. Introduction

As explained in Chapter 1, a variety of electromagnetic narrow pulses, such as Gaussian, monocycle, Hermite, wavelet, and others, can be used for various UWB applications. The selection of the pulse shape is driven primarily by the desirable frequency band that the pulse is to occupy. However, the main characteristics of all pulses used in UWB systems are high-peak power and fast-rise time, typically less than 1 nanosecond. The generation of subnanosecond pulses with large amplitudes plays a critical role in UWB communications. Pulse generators are used not only in UWB transmitters but also in most UWB receivers for template generation to perform the correlation operation on the received pulses—as we'll see in Chapter 3.

Although ...