A high efficiency low noise rf-to-dc converter employing gm-boosting envelope detector and offset canceled latch comparator

This work presents a high efficiency RF-to-DC conversion circuit composed of an LC-CL balun-based Gm-boosting envelope detector, a low noise baseband amplifier, and an offset canceled latch comparator. It was designed to have high sensitivity with low power consumption for wakeup receiver (WuRx) applications. The proposed envelope detector is based on a fully integrated inductively degenerated common-source amplifier with a series gate inductor. The LC-CL balun circuit is merged with the core of the envelope detector by sharing the on-chip gate and source inductors. The proposed technique doubles the transconductance of the input transistor of the envelope detector without any extra power consumption because the gate and source voltage on the input transistor operates in a differential mode. This results in a higher RF-to-DC conversion gain. In order to improve the sensitivity of the wake-up radio, the DC offset of the latch comparator circuit is canceled by controlling the body bias voltage of a pair of differential input transistors through a binary-weighted current source cell. In addition, the hysteresis characteristic is implemented in order to avoid unstable operation by the large noise at the compared signal. The hysteresis window is programmable by changing the channel width of the latch transistor. The low noise baseband amplifier amplifies the output signal of the envelope detector and transfers it into the comparator circuit with low noise. For the 2.4 GHz WuRx, the proposed envelope detector with no external matching components shows the simulated conversion gain of about 16.79 V/V when the input power is around the sensitivity of −60 dBm, and this is 1.7 times higher than that of the conventional envelope detector with the same current and load. The proposed RF-to-DC conversion circuit (WuRx) achieves a sensitivity of about −65.4 dBm based on 45% to 55% duty, dissipating a power of 22 µW from a 1.2 V supply voltage. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.1

Integrated Circuits and Systems for Smart Sensory Applications

Connected intelligent sensing reshapes our society by empowering people with increasing new ways of mutual interactions. As integration technologies keep their scaling roadmap, the horizon of sensory applications is rapidly widening, thanks to myriad light-weight low-power or, in same cases even self-powered, smart devices with high-connectivity capabilities. CMOS integrated circuits technology is the best candidate to supply the required smartness and to pioneer these emerging sensory systems. As a result, new challenges are arising around the design of these integrated circuits and systems for sensory applications in terms of low-power edge computing, power management strategies, low-range wireless communications, integration with sensing devices. In this Special Issue recent advances in application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and systems for smart sensory applications in the following five emerging topics: (I) dedicated short-range communications transceivers; (II) digital smart sensors, (III) implantable neural interfaces, (IV) Power Management Strategies in wireless sensor nodes and (V) neuromorphic hardware

NRF52-piirisarjaan perustuva elektroninen ohjausjärjestelmän kehitysalusta

Aim of the thesis was to develop and build an embedded hardware device that utilizes a SoC from the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52-series. The purpose was to create a modular platform that would be capable of controlling later developed control system applications. The selected example application was a heating control system for a small scale wood chip burning water boiler. The nRF52-series devices are SoC’s with integrated 2.4 GHz radio modules, which are intended for implementing low bandwidth wireless networks such as BLE or ANT+. The devices have a ARM Cortex-M4 processors integrated to a set of peripheral devices. The processors are capable of running both application code and wireless networks stacks in the same device, which makes them fully integrated wireless SoC solutions. In the platform the radio is planned to be used for extending the user interface as well as connecting additional devices such as sensors. However, the content of the thesis is solely focused on developing and implementing hardware part of the design. The hardware developed in the thesis is a modular three board design. Consisting of one main board with the SoC and two auxiliary boards with connection interfaces to the application. The boards are supplied from mains network and can control three mains powered devices with duplicated switches for safety. When mains network is not available, the device operates from a integrated li-ion battery which keeps non-mains related features working from several hours to multiple days. Other main features include a BLE radio, USB serial interface, battery charger and a configurable interface for thermocouples and resistive temperature sensors. Additionally the device has a user interface consisting of a LED-array, two digit 7-segment display, buzzer, buttons and a motorized potentiometer. Design decisions, implementation and some operational theory are covered in the theoretical part of the thesis. In the practical part of the thesis, all features of the three boards were designed as well as a schematic and layout of the boards were drawn. Component sourcing, board assembly and reflow soldering were also done within the thesis. All boards were designed to fit in a off-the-self enclosure with custom designed and manufactured front panel serving as the user interface. The work done during the thesis covers a full electronic hardware device development process and resulted in an actual devices that can be used to control applications such as the boiler heating system

In situ underwater microwave oil spill and oil slick thickness sensor

Nearly 30 percent of oil drilled globally is done offshore. Oil spillage offshore have far-reaching consequences on the environment, aquatic lives, and livelihoods as it was evident in the numerous accidents such as the Deepwater Horizon and Bonga oil spillages. Apart from detecting oil spillages, the determination of the oil slick thickness is very important. This is to enable the estimation of the volume and spread of oil discharged in oceans, seas and lakes. This information could guide the oil spill countermeasures and provide the basis for legal actions against the defaulting parties. The viability of the use of radar in the detection of oil spill has already been established by airborne and space borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Notwithstanding, the high latency associated with SARs and its susceptibility of false positive and false negative detection of oil slick makes it vulnerable. It has also not been very successful in the determination of oil slick thickness. In situ methods such as the capacitive, conductive and optical based approaches have been used to detect as well as determine oil slick thickness. Some of these contact-based approaches are susceptible to corrosion, fouling and require several calibrations. Radio frequency (RF) signals in seawater suffer from attenuation and dispersion due to the high conductivity of the medium. Antennas, ideally matched to free space, suffer impedance mismatches when immersed in seawater. In this thesis, we proposed the novel approach of using microwave techniques to detect oil spillage and determine oil slick thickness based on a contact-based in situ approach. The work began by undertaking an investigation into the properties of the North Sea water which was used as the primary transmission medium for the study. Subsequently, the research developed an ultrawideband antenna that radiated underwater, which was encapsulated in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The antenna-sensor with a Faraday cage was used to develop a novel microwave oil spill sensor. A communication backbone was designed for the sensor using long range (LoRa) 868 MHz frequency based on a bespoke braid antenna buffered by oil impregnated papers to ameliorate against the influence of the seawater surface. Using a four layered RF switch controller and an antenna array consisting of four antenna-sensors, a novel microwave oil slick thickness sensor was developed. The antenna-sensors were arranged in a cuboid fashion with antenna-sensor 3 and antenna-sensor 4 capable of detecting oil slick thickness at 23 mm and 46 mm using their transmission coefficient (S43) of -10 dB and -19 dB compared to that of the pure seawater respectively. For the 69 mm and 92 mm thickness, the transmission coefficient (S21) of antenna-sensor 1 and antenna-sensor 2 was used to determine these thicknesses with values of -13.5 dB and -24.14 dB with respect to that of pure seawater

Ultra-low power, low-voltage transmitter at ISM band for short range transceivers

Tezin basılısı İstanbul Şehir Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi'ndedir.The increasing demand for technology to be used in every aspect of our lives has led the way to many new applications and communication standards. WSN and BAN are some of the new examples that utilize electronic circuit design in the form of very small sensors to perform their applications. They consist of small sensor nodes and have applications ranging from entertainment to medicine. Requirements such as decreasing the area and the power consumption help to have longer-lasting batteries and smaller devices. The standard paves the way for the devices from different vendors to communicate with each other, and that motivates us to make designs as compatible with the standard as it can be. In this thesis, an ultra-low power high efficient transmitter with a small area working at 2.4 GHz have been designed for BAN applications. A study on the system-view perspective is important in optimizing the area and power since the transmitter architecture can change the circuit design. From a circuit design perspective, seeking to decrease power consumption means thinking of new techniques to implement the same function or a new system. Inspired by new trends, this research presents a design solution to the previously mentioned problem and hopefully, after fabrication, the measured results will match the simulated results to prove the validity of the design.Declaration of Authorship ii Abstract iv Öz v Acknowledgments vii List of Figures x List of Tables xiii Abbreviations xiv 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Background and Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 Communication Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2.1 Digital Modulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.2.2 Unwanted Power Limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2.3 Multiple Access Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.3 Transmitter System Level Specifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.3.1 Low Power Wireless Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.4 Low-Power Wireless Transceiver systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.4.1 Survey of the previous work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.4.2 The Designed Transmitter System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1.5 Ultra-Low Power Transmitters Performance Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1.6 Thesis Contribution and Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2 Circuit Design for The Transmitter 11 2.1 Technology Characterization and Modeling for Low-Power Designs . . . 11 2.1.1 Passive Components modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2.1.2 Active Components Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.1.3 MOS Transistor Sub-threshold Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.1.4 MOS Transistor Simulation-Based Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2.2 Low-Voltage Low-Power Analog and RF Design Principles . . . . . . . . . 17 2.2.1 Separate Gate Biasing of The Inverter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.2.2 Body Biasing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.3 Low-Voltage Analog Mixed Biasing Circuit Designs . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.3.1 DAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.3.2 Operational Amplifier Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.4 Crystal Oscillator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 2.4.1 The MEMS Crystal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 2.4.2 Crystal Oscillator Topologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2.4.3 Design of The CMOS Crystal Oscillator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 2.5 Pre-Driver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 2.6 OOK Modulator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 2.7 BPSK Modulator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 2.8 Digital Control of the Modulators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 2.9 Power Amplifier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 2.9.1 ULP PA Topologies Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 2.9.2 The Push-Pull PA Design Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 2.10 Transmit/Receive (T/R) Switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 2.10.1 T/R Switch Topologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 2.10.2 Suggested Low-Area Low-Voltage RF Switch . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 3 Transmitter Integration and Final Results 48 3.1 Transmitter Simulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 3.2 Transmitter Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 3.3 Results Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 3.4 Results Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 4 Conclusions 59 4.1 Thesis Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 4.2 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 A Bond Wire Parasitic Modeling 61 B Crystal Oscillator With Parasitic Effects 67 B.1 Simulation of FBAR with Parasitic Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 B.2 Root Locus Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Bibliography 7

Development of an FPGA and MCU based Stack-able Processing platform incorporated with on-board compute module for Real-time processing applications

The focus of this thesis is to develop an FPGA and MCU-based stackable processing platform incorporated with an on-board computer module for real-time processing applications. The goal is to deliver a compact-sized hardware platform with extensible capabilities to provide high-speed, parallel computing with low power consumption. This hardware platform is named ioNeurons and consists of three module types: processing modules, sensing modules, and interface modules. The ioNeurons ecosystem design is based on combining individual strengths into highly adaptable and powerful solutions. The processing modules are stackable in no particular order, allowing the ability to match multiple modules’ individual capabilities to the project’s needs. Developers can assign tasks to multiple processing modules according to the different real-time requirements. The implementation of a small-scale quadrotor helicopter is introduced as an application of this hardware platform

Ambient backscatterers for low cost and low power wireless applications

Sensors that are used in Internet-of-Things (IoT) area are hampered by extremely high costs and excessive battery power consumption – but wireless, reflective, sensor-tags could help address these issues. In agricultural applications: in order to monitor a field of 500 plants, the operating cost will typically rack up hundreds of pounds per field and will gobble tens of milliwatts per sensor. In this thesis we have tried to address some of these shortfalls by opting for each plant to have an antenna, one transistor that acts as a switch, and one microcontroller. Each sensor uses wireless communication based on a reflections technology known as backscatter. The antenna acts as a mirror and when it is illuminated with a signal, it reflects back the wave. The signal comes from an FM radio station and it is freely available in the air. The plant-sensor can modulate the information by a very smart switching of this antenna. We are trying, under laboratory conditions, to combine this low power, low-cost technology with tape-based, flexible nanomaterial printed sensors. As nanotechnology enables flexible inkjet printed electronics to revolutionise IoT applications, we developed a new technology and we hope that our nanomaterial based printed circuit sensors will help push state-of-the-art additive manufacturing in agricultural technology

Circuits and Systems for Energy Harvesting and Internet of Things Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) continues its growing trend, while new “smart” objects are con-stantly being developed and commercialized in the market. Under this paradigm, every common object will be soon connected to the Internet: mobile and wearable devices, electric appliances, home electronics and even cars will have Internet connectivity. Not only that, but a variety of wireless sensors are being proposed for different consumer and industrial applications. With the possibility of having hundreds of billions of IoT objects deployed all around us in the coming years, the social implications and the economic impact of IoT technology needs to be seriously considered. There are still many challenges, however, awaiting a solution in order to realize this future vision of a connected world. A very important bottleneck is the limited lifetime of battery powered wireless devices. Fully depleted batteries need to be replaced, which in perspective would generate costly maintenance requirements and environmental pollution. However, a very plausible solution to this dilemma can be found in harvesting energy from the ambient. This dissertation focuses in the design of circuits and system for energy harvesting and Internet of Things applications. The first part of this dissertation introduces the research motivation and fundamentals of energy harvesting and power management units (PMUs). The architecture of IoT sensor nodes and PMUs is examined to observe the limitations of modern energy harvesting systems. Moreover, several architectures for multisource harvesting are reviewed, providing a background for the research presented here. Then, a new fully integrated system architecture for multisource energy harvesting is presented. The design methodology, implementation, trade-offs and measurement results of the proposed system are described. The second part of this dissertation focus on the design and implementation of low-power wireless sensor nodes for precision agriculture. First, a sensor node incorporating solar energy harvesting and a dynamic power management strategy is presented. The operation of a wireless sensor network for soil parameter estimation, consisting of four nodes is demonstrated. After that, a solar thermoelectric generator (STEG) prototype for powering a wireless sensor node is proposed. The implemented solar thermoelectric generator demonstrates to be an alternative way to harvest ambient energy, opening the possibility for its use in agricultural and environmental applications. The open problems in energy harvesting for IoT devices are discussed at the end, to delineate the possible future work to improve the performance of EH systems. For all the presented works, proof-of-concept prototypes were fabricated and tested. The measured results are used to verify their correct operation and performance

Advanced CMOS Integrated Circuit Design and Application

The recent development of various application systems and platforms, such as 5G, B5G, 6G, and IoT, is based on the advancement of CMOS integrated circuit (IC) technology that enables them to implement high-performance chipsets. In addition to development in the traditional fields of analog and digital integrated circuits, the development of CMOS IC design and application in high-power and high-frequency operations, which was previously thought to be possible only with compound semiconductor technology, is a core technology that drives rapid industrial development. This book aims to highlight advances in all aspects of CMOS integrated circuit design and applications without discriminating between different operating frequencies, output powers, and the analog/digital domains. Specific topics in the book include: Next-generation CMOS circuit design and application; CMOS RF/microwave/millimeter-wave/terahertz-wave integrated circuits and systems; CMOS integrated circuits specially used for wireless or wired systems and applications such as converters, sensors, interfaces, frequency synthesizers/generators/rectifiers, and so on; Algorithm and signal-processing methods to improve the performance of CMOS circuits and systems