Ultra-low power wake-up receiver RF front-ends design

Abstract

Wireless sensor network is an emerging technique attracting more and more attentions. In the network, each sensor node is required to consume less than 100uW in order to operate over years with only an AA battery or through energy scavenging. However, state-of-the-art receivers could not meet such low power requirements. Then, an extra receiver consuming much less lower power, named wake-up receiver, is needed to prolong the nodes’ life-time. This thesis focuses on ultra-low power RF front-ends design for wake-up receiver in wireless sensor network with CMOS technology. Two low power receiver architectures, super-regenerative receiver and tuned-RF receiver, are explored by operating the circuits in weak inversion region with low supply voltage. Fully quenched super-regenerative receiver and two-step wake-up receiver based on tuned-RF architecture are proposed separately to dramatically reduce the receiver power consumption. The super-regenerative receiver front-end is designed for 2.4GHz ISM band application. The tuned-RF receiver front-end is designed targeting 915MHz ISM band application. Both are designed with TSMC$0.18\microm$ CMOS technology.