Robust time shift tracking UWB receiver

A time drift tracking Ultra Wide Band (UWB) receiver, for receiving a pulsed UWB signal, the pulsed UWB signal comprising pulses following each other with a first repetition period (Tc), modulated at a carrier frequency, said pulsed UWB signal being further modulated to transmit information symbols, each information symbol being transmitted over a time-symbol (RLTc) during which the information symbol is repeated a plurality (R) of times, said UWB receiver comprising:

• a quadrature mixer for translating in baseband said pulsed UWB signal using a translation frequency, equal, within an offset frequency amount, to said carrier frequency;
• an integrating stage for integrating said signal thus translated in baseband, during selected time windows, each selected time window being repeated with a second period (T1);
• a sampling stage for sampling the integration results on said selected time windows and providing a complex sample for each of them;
• a demodulating/detecting module, implemented by circuitry of the UWB receiver, for estimating said information symbols from the complex samples thus obtained;
• said UWB receiver further comprising:
• a phase estimator, for estimating at each time-symbol, a phase of the complex samples, free of a modulation due to the information symbols thus estimated;
• a phase rotation follow-up module, implemented by the circuitry, receiving a rotation of a phase recently estimated from a reference instant for a current time-symbol and a rotation of phase previously compensated from this same instant at a previous time-symbol, and deducing therefrom a non-compensated phase rotation based on a difference between the recently estimated phase rotation and the previously compensated phase rotation;
• and
• a controller, implemented by the circuitry, for applying a time offset to said time windows to compensate for said non-compensated phase rotation for the current time symbol,
• wherein the phase rotation follow-up module receives the rotation of phase previously compensated for the previous time symbol from the controller.