Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology exploits modulated coded impulses over a wide frequency spectrum with very low power over a short distance for digital data transmission. Today's leading edge modulated sinusoidal wave wireless communication standards and systems achieve power efficiencies of 50 nJ/bit employing narrowband signaling schemes and traditional RF transceiver architectures. However, such designs severely limit the achievable energy efficiency, especially at lower data rates such as below 1 Mbps. Further, it is important that peak power consumption is supportable by common battery or energy harvesting technologies and long term power consumption neither leads to limited battery lifetimes or an inability for alternate energy sources to sustain them. Accordingly, it would be beneficial for next generation applications to exploit inventive transceiver structures and communication schemes in order to achieve the sub nJ per bit energy efficiencies required by next generation applications.

A power transmitter includes: a first switch coupled between a first node and a reference voltage node; a second switch configured to be coupled between a power supply and the first node; a coil and a capacitor coupled in series between the first node and the reference voltage node; a first sample-and-hold (S&H) circuit having an input coupled to the first node; and a timing control circuit configured to generate a first control signal, a second control signal, and a third control signal that have a same frequency, where the first control signal is configured to turn ON and OFF the first switch alternately, the second control signal is configured to turn ON and OFF the second switch alternately, and where the third control signal determines a sampling time of the first S&H circuit and has a first pre-determined delay from a first edge of the first control signal.

A communication system is configured to use a pulse width modulation signal as transmission code among a plurality of nodes connected to a communication line. A master node includes a transmission transistor connected to the communication line, a detector configured to detect a variation in current during the on-period of the transmission transistor, and a communication circuit configured to determine the off-timing of the transmission transistor based on the timing of occurrence of the variation in current (i.e., the on-timing of a second transmission transistor provided in a slave node). For example, the communication circuit can be configured to determine the off-timing of the transmission transistor such that the simultaneously-on period TB of the transmission transistor and the second transmission transistor fulfills TB=(2n−1)/2f, where f is the frequency of EMI noise.

A communication system is configured to use a pulse width modulation signal as transmission code among a plurality of nodes connected to a communication line. A master node includes a transmission transistor connected to the communication line, a detector configured to detect a variation in current during the on-period of the transmission transistor, and a communication circuit configured to determine the off-timing of the transmission transistor based on the timing of occurrence of the variation in current (i.e., the on-timing of a second transmission transistor provided in a slave node). For example, the communication circuit can be configured to determine the off-timing of the transmission transistor such that the simultaneously-on period TB of the transmission transistor and the second transmission transistor fulfills TB=(2n−1)/2f, where f is the frequency of EMI noise.

A transceiver circuit includes a receiver front end utilizing a ring oscillator, and a transmitter front end utilizing a pass-gate circuit in a first feedback path across a last-stage driver circuit. The transceiver circuit provides low impedance at low frequency and high impedance at high frequency, and desirable peaking behavior.

A system and method for recovering encoded data from a modulated baseband signal is disclosed. Aspects and embodiments of the system and method include receiving an analog input signal representing a modulated baseband signal, counting clock cycles of a reference clock, detecting a first transition and a second transition of the analog input signal indicating a first change and a second change in the modulated baseband signal, storing a first counter value corresponding to an amount of clock cycles elapsed between the first transition and the second transition, and determining a binary-valued bit sequence corresponding to the first counter value.

Disclosed are techniques related to wireless communication system in which multi-level encoded modulation (MLCM) is applied to non-coherent communication. In the proposed techniques, a small fraction of differential phase rotations or bits participating in differential symbol coding are protected with strong codes while other complementary differential phase rotations or bits are protected with weaker codes. Compared to conventional non-coherent communication techniques in which a uniform protection is applied to any fraction of differential phase rotation or any bit of a differential symbol, the proposed MLCM approach enables more spectrally efficient scheme.

Systems and methods include receiving a plurality of symbols that are part of a defined Digital Signal Processing (DSP) frame for coherent optical communication, wherein the DSP frame structure has a messaging channel incorporated therein that includes a subset of the plurality of symbols; capturing multiple samples of the messaging channel; and determining a message in the messaging channel based on analysis of the multiple samples. The method can further include transmitting, in the messaging channel, a reply to the message with the reply being repeated multiple times. The analysis is performed prior to Forward Error Correction (FEC) decoding on the data path.

Methods, systems, and apparatus described herein make a multi-level PAM signal (PAM-N signal) at a transmitter using CMOS-based components. By forming the PAM-N signal at the transmitter, receivers do not have to recombine and/or realign multiple signals and only employs a single transmission line channel (or two transmission line channels in differential implementations) to convey the data stream to the receiver from the transmitter.

A control panel for a fire alarm system includes a microprocessor operable to send and receive data. The microprocessor has a serial peripheral interface with a master port and a slave port. A computing device has a Differential Manchester encoder configured to encode data received from the master port and a Differential Manchester decoder configured to decode frames and send the decoded data to the slave port. A method of sending and receiving data is also disclosed.