Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has been applied in many fields, such as radar and indoor positioning, because of its advantages of having a high transmission rate, anti-multipath interference, and good concealment. In the UWB physical layer, the transmitting link, including an encoder and a pulse generator, is used to improve the anti-interference ability of the signal, while the receiving link, including a receiver and a decoder, can correct the error signal. Therefore, the performance of the UWB physical layer can obviously affect the speed and quality of UWB signal transmission. In this paper, the structure and performance of the codec and transceiver of the UWB physical layer are introduced and compared. In addition, some typical architectures and features are summarized and discussed, which provides a valuable reference and suggestions for the design of the UWB physical layer. Finally, the outlook of the UWB physical layer is presented: its development direction mainly includes high speed, low power consumption, and fewer hardware resources.
Keywords: UWB; decoder; encoder; physical layer; pulse generator; receiver.