Increasing interest in ultra-wideband (UWB) communications has engendered the need

for a test bed for UWB systems. An FPGA-based software-defined radio provides both postfabrication

definition of the radio and ample parallel processing power. This thesis presents

the FPGA design for a software-defined radio targeted to impulse ultra-wideband signals.

The system is capable of an effective sampling frequency of up to 8 G-samples/s using timeinterleaved

sampling with eight 1-GHz ADCs. The system is also capable of transmitting

UWB pulses using a transmitter board controlled by the FPGA. In this thesis, the FPGA

design used to capture and export data from the eight ADCs is presented, along with two

systems which make use of the transceiver: a pilot-based matched filter communications

system, and a remote vital signs monitor.