Short-range zigbee compatible receiver with near-threshold digital baseband

摘要

An 8.1 nJ/bit 2.4 GHz receiver with integrated digital baseband supporting Q-QPSK DSSS modulation compliant with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is presented that targets short-range, Internet of Things applications (IoTs). The sensitivity of a wireless communication receiver in general trades with power consumption. This receiver exploits this tradeoff to achieve a total power consumption of 2.02 mW including ADCs and digital baseband processing, at a sensitivity of −52.5 dBm at 250 Kbps. The energy-efficiency of the radio frequency (RF) front-end alone is nearly two times better than the prior art. The receiver was fabricated in 65 nm CMOS with an area of 0.86 mm2.

主权项

1. A method for operating a short-range receiver with a digital baseband processor, comprising:
receiving, by a RF front-end circuit in the receiver, a network data packet over a data link of a wireless network; sampling, by an analog-to-digital converter, a portion of the network data packet at a given sampling rate; determining, by the digital baseband processor, a metric indicative of quality of the data link over which the network data packet was received; lowering, by the digital baseband processor, the given sampling rate of the network data packet to a reduced uniform or non-uniform sampling rate, where the reduced sampling rate is set inversely to quality of the data link and has a value lower than the given sampling rate; and processing, by the digital baseband processor, remainder of the network data packet at the reduced sampling rate, wherein lowering the given sampling rate further comprises disabling the analog-to-digital converter for a portion of the sampling interval and disabling at least one other active circuit in the receiver for the portion of the sampling interval.