A Sub-0.6V, 330 µW, 0.15 mm2 Receiver Front-End for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) in 22 nm FD-SOI with Zero External Components

A 2.4 GHz highly power efficient receiver front-end for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is presented in this paper. Thanks to the extensive current reuse scheme combined with the passive source-boosting topology and exploiting forward back gate biasing (FBB) of active devices, the low-noise transconductance amplifier (LNTA) input impedance is matched to 50 $Omega$ with 18 times less current compared to a single common-gate (CG) LNTA. Moreover, a high swing Class-C VCO operating at the twice the desired frequency drives the frequency divider by 2 to create 4 phases with 25% duty cycle. Implemented in 22 nm FD-SOI technology, the proposed receiver front-end consumes only $330 mu mathbf{W}$ from 0.55 V and occupies an active area of 0.15 mm 2 . The measured conversion gain and NF are 32.3 dB and 9.4 dB respectively. The proposed receiver consumes the least power among all previous published papers while its performance is largely superior to the requirement of intended applications

Efficient and Interference-Resilient Wireless Connectivity for IoT Applications

With the coming of age of the Internet of Things (IoT), demand on ultra-low power (ULP) and low-cost radios will continue to boost tremendously. The Bluetooth-Low-energy (BLE) standard provides a low power solution to connect IoT nodes with mobile devices, however, the power of maintaining a connection with a reasonable latency remains the limiting factor in defining the lifetime of event-driven BLE devices. BLE radio power consumption is in the milliwatt range and can be duty cycled for average powers around 30μW, but at the expense of long latency. Furthermore, wireless transceivers traditionally perform local oscillator (LO) calibration using an external crystal oscillator (XTAL) that adds significant size and cost to a system. Removing the XTAL enables a true single-chip radio, but an alternate means for calibrating the LO is required. Innovations in both the system architecture and circuits implementation are essential for the design of truly ubiquitous receivers for IoT applications. This research presents two porotypes as back-channel BLE receivers, which have lower power consumption while still being robust in the presents of interference and able to receive back-channel message from BLE compliant transmitters. In addition, the first crystal-less transmitter with symmetric over-the-air clock recovery compliant with the BLE standard using a GFSK-Modulated BLE Packet is presented.PHDElectrical and Computer EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162942/1/abdulalg_1.pd