A Low Cost BLE Transceiver with RX Matching Network Reusing PA Load Inductor for WSNs Applications

Abstract

In this work, a low cost Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) transceiver for wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, with a receiver (RX) matching network reusing power amplifier (PA) load inductor, is presented. In order to decrease the die area, only two inductors were used in this work. Besides the one used in the voltage control oscillator (VCO), the PA load inductor was reused as the RX impedance matching component in the front-end. Proper controls have been applied to achieve high transmitter (TX) input impedance when the transceiver is in the receiving mode, and vice versa. This allows the TRX-switch/matching network integration without significant performance degradation. The RX adopted a low-IF structure and integrated a single-ended low noise amplifier (LNA), a current bleeding mixer, a 4th complex filter and a delta-sigma continuous time (CT) analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The TX employed a two-point PLL-based architecture with a non-linear PA. The RX achieved a sensitivity of −93 dBm and consumes 9.7 mW, while the TX achieved a 2.97% error vector magnitude (EVM) with 9.4 mW at 0 dBm output power. This design was fabricated in a 0.11 μm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology and the front-end circuit only occupies 0.24 mm2. The measurement results verify the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed BLE transceiver for WSN applications.

40 dB-Isolation, 1.85 dB-Insertion Loss Full CMOS SPDT Switch with Body-Floating Technique and Ultra-Small Active Matching Network Using On-Chip Solenoid Inductor for BLE Applications

“…Bluetooth is designed for the short distance communication with extremely low power consumption and simple communication protocol [5,6]. Therefore, Bluetooth is the standard communication idea for the sensor system [7][8][9][10]. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) plays an important role in achieving lower cost, lower power, and compact size.…”

“…One antenna is shared between the Tx and Rx for reducing the size of the system, as shown in Figure 1. The key component that realizes this system is the radio frequency (RF) switch called the Single Pole Double Throw (SPDT) switch [5][6][7][8][9]. The SPDT switch connects the transmit path or the receive path to the antenna in the Tx or Rx mode, respectively, while disconnecting the other path.…”

Current/Voltage Controlled Quadrature Sinusoidal Oscillators for Phase Sensitive Detection Using Commercially Available IC

“…Substituting (10) into (12) and (13), the frequency of oscillation, which is independently and electronically controlled from the condition of oscillation, is given by (14) and the condition of oscillation, which is independently and electronically controlled from the frequency, is given by…”

“…This sort of oscillator is called a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) or current controlled oscillator (CCO). Many voltage controlled oscillators are found in sensor applications, for example, in impedance spectroscopy [1], microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) sensor [4], IoT sensors [5,6], motion detection sensors [7], sensor readout circuit [8], wireless sensor network [9][10][11], basal-body-temperature detection sensor [12], image sensor [13], intelligent human sensing system [14], etc. These voltage controlled oscillators are designed and implemented in CMOS chips, which provides many advantages, for example, low power consumption, compact size, low voltage operation, high speed, etc.…”

The Synchronization Transceiver Design and Experimental Verification for the LuTan-1 SAR Satellite

“…In the assembly process of power amplifier for STR, the final PA-gallium nitride (GaN) power transistor is interconnected with its peripheral circuit through gold wire (gold belt) bonding. Due to the parasitic inductance introduced by the bonding gold wire, the impedance matching of the amplifier is affected [32,33]. In engineering, the effect of parasitic inductance on output matching of PA can be eliminated by adding capacitive debugging blocks (CDB), thus improving the output impedance matching of PA.…”