This paper presents the analytical results of the effects of jitter and intersymbol interference (ISI) on a millimeter-wave impulse radio (IR) transceiver, compared with the performance of a developed 10-Gb/s W-band IR-transmitter prototype. The IR transmitter, which is compact and cost-effective, consists of a pulse generator (PG) that creates an extremely short pulse, a band-pass filter (BPF) that shapes the short pulse to the desired millimeter-wave pulse (wavelet), and an optional power amplifier. The jitters of the PG and ISI from the BPF are a hindrance in making the IR transceiver robust and in obtaining excellent performance. One analysis verified that, because of a novel retiming architecture, the random jitter and the data-dependent jitter from the PG give only a small penalty of < 0.5-dB increase in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for achieving a bit error rate (BER) of < 10^-12. An alternative analysis on the effect of ISI from the BPF indicated that using a Gaussian BPF enables a transmission with a BER of < 10^-12 up to a data rate of 1.4 times as large as the bandwidth of the BPF, which is twice as high as that of a conventional amplitude shift keying (ASK) system. The analysis also showed that the IR system is more sensitive to the ISI than the ASK system and suggested that the mismatching of the skirt characteristics of the developed BPF with those of a Gaussian BPF causes tail lobes following the wavelet, resulting in an on/off ratio of 15dB and hence, an SNR penalty of 6dB.