  In this paper we consider the design of spectrally efficient time-limited
pulses for ultrawideband (UWB) systems using an overlapping pulse position
modulation scheme. For this we investigate an orthogonalization method, which
was developed in 1950 by Per-Olov L\"owdin. Our objective is to obtain a set of
N orthogonal (L\"owdin) pulses, which remain time-limited and spectrally
efficient for UWB systems, from a set of N equidistant translates of a
time-limited optimal spectral designed UWB pulse. We derive an approximate
L\"owdin orthogonalization (ALO) by using circulant approximations for the Gram
matrix to obtain a practical filter implementation. We show that the centered
ALO and L\"owdin pulses converge pointwise to the same Nyquist pulse as N tends
to infinity. The set of translates of the Nyquist pulse forms an orthonormal
basis or the shift-invariant space generated by the initial spectral optimal
pulse. The ALO transform provides a closed-form approximation of the L\"owdin
transform, which can be implemented in an analog fashion without the need of
analog to digital conversions. Furthermore, we investigate the interplay
between the optimization and the orthogonalization procedure by using methods
from the theory of shift-invariant spaces. Finally we develop a connection
between our results and wavelet and frame theory.
