A Synchronization Design for UWB-Based Wireless Multimedia Systems

Multi-Band Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) Ultra-WideBand (UWB) technology offers large throughput, low latency and has been adopted in wireless Audio/Video (AV) network products. The complexity and power consumption, however, are still major hurdles for the technology to be widely adopted. In this paper, the authors propose a unified synchronizer design targeted for MB-OFDM transceiver that achieves high performance with low implementation complexity. The key component of the proposed synchronizer is a parallel auto-correlator structure in which multiple ACF units are instantiated and their outputs are shared by functional blocks in the synchronizer, including preamble signal detection, time-frequency code identification, symbol timing and carrier frequency offset estimation and frame synchronization.