Ultra-wideband transceiver board with a single-ended down converter for sequential sampling of radar echoes

In this paper, a complete UWB radar board was discussed. A single-ended down converter was implemented having the advantage that nor baluns neither expensive components like SPDs nor DDSs are required. Especially the substitution of the DDS leads to a lower maximum jitter of 7 ps yielding a better performance of the hardware and a more accurate reconstruction of the received echoes. Furthermore, the circuit was designed for the utilisation of off-the shelf components leading to an overall prize of all components of approximately 2 Euros. The dynamic range spans from -35 dBm to -5 dBm. The functionality of the hardware was demonstrated on sampling down an UWB pulse of just 200 ps.