A 500mW 5Mbps ULP super-regenerative RF front-end

Abstract

This paper presents an ultra low power superregenerative RF front-end for wireless body area network (WBAN) applications. The RF front-end operates in the 2.36-2.4 GHz medical BAN and 2.4-2.485 GHz ISM bands, and consumes 500 m m m mW. It supports OOK modulation at high data rates ranging from 1-5 Mbps. It achieves a sensitivity of -67 dBm at a BER of 10 -3 . The combination of digital and analog quench generation and RF front-end optimization provides ultra-low power consumption at high data rates. The RF front end is implemented in a 90 nm CMOS technology and is packaged in a QFN56 package.

A low-power 2.4-GHz combined LNA–VCO structure in 0.13-µm CMOS

“…The nominal I bias is adjusted to 300 lA which results in a single-ended peak-to-peak voltage swing of 370 mV at the output of the VCO. The value of the bias current is consistent with the calculated minimum value of 225 lA as derived in (6). The supply voltage is 0.8 V and the overall power consumption of the circuit is 240 lW.…”

“…The last approach is to use elegant techniques to extract the information from the RF received signal without using conventional blocks such as low-noise amplification and down-conversion. Among popular solutions in this latter class are envelope detection [5], super-regenerative receivers [6], and injection-locked-based demodulators [7]. However, these techniques may not be as flexible as the first two approaches as they may not be suitable for some modulation schemes.…”

Performance evaluation of an ultra-low power receiver for body area networks (BAN)

“…The RF frontend block in the figure includes the low-noise amplifier (LNA), RF oscillator and envelope detector. The design and measurement results for this individual block can be found at [25]. In this paper, we focus on the total receiver, which includes the RF frontend, variable gain amplifier (VGA) and analog-to-digital converter (ADC).…”