In this letter, we consider a novel ultra-wideband (UWB) spatial multiplexing (SM) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) structure, which consists of prerake diversity combiners in the transmitter and a zero forcing (ZF) detector in the receiver. For a UWB SM MIMO system with N transmit antennas, M receive antennas, and L resolvable multipath components, it is shown that the proposed prerake combining-based MIMO detection scheme has the diversity order of (LN - M + 1) and its BER performance is analytically presented in a log-normal fading channel and also compared with that of a rake combining-based ZF scheme.