2017/10/18 by Chang, Gregory, Maity, Shovan, Chatterjee, Baibhab +1
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1710.06541
Emerging health-monitor applications, such as information transmission through multi-channel neural implants, image and video communication from inside the body etc., calls for ultra-low active power (<50μW) high data-rate, energy-scalable, highly energy-efficient (pJ/bit) radios. Previous literature has strongly focused on low average power duty-cycled radios or low power but low-date radios. In this paper, we investigate power performance trade-off of each front-end component in a conventional radio including active matching, down-conversion and RF/IF amplification and prioritize them based on highest performance/energy metric. The analysis reveals 50Ω active matching and RF gain is prohibitive for 50μW power-budget. A mixer-first architecture with an N-path mixer and a self-biased inverter based baseband LNA, designed in TSMC 65nm technology show that sub 50μW performance can be achieved up to 10Mbps (< 5pJ/b) with OOK modulation.