Ultra-Wideband Communications: Fundamentals and Applications

3.2. Conventional Pulse-Detection Techniques

3.2.1. Energy Detectors

Energy detectors are simple, noncoherent receivers that detect the energy of a signal and compare it with a threshold level to demodulate the data bits. Figure 3-1 shows the block diagram of an elementary energy detector receiver.

Figure 3-1. Noncoherent energy detector receiver

As shown in Figure 3-1, energy detector receivers are composed of a squaring device, followed by a finite integrator and a decision threshold comparator. If the signal is present, its energy is calculated by squaring the signal. Once this energy passes a certain threshold, the data is demodulated as a ...