Design Considerations of a Sub-50 {\mu}W Receiver Front-end for Implantable Devices in MedRadio Band

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 (<50${\mu}$W) 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 50${\Omega}$ active matching and RF gain is prohibitive for 50${\mu}$W 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 50${\mu}$W performance can be achieved up to 10Mbps (< 5pJ/b) with OOK modulation.Comment: Accepted to appear on International Conference on VLSI Design 2018 (VLSID

Analysis of DVB-H network coverage with the application of transmit diversity

This paper investigates the effects of the Cyclic Delay Diversity (CDD) transmit diversity scheme on DVB-H networks. Transmit diversity improves reception and Quality of Service (QoS) in areas of poor coverage such as sparsely populated or obscured locations. The technique not only povides robust reception in mobile environments thus improving QoS, but it also reduces network costs in terms of the transmit power, number of infrastructure elements, antenna height and the frequency reuse factor over indoor and outdoor environments. In this paper, the benefit and effectiveness of CDD transmit diversity is tackled through simulation results for comparison in several scenarios of coverage in DVB-H networks. The channel model used in the simulations is based on COST207 and a basic radio planning technique is used to illustrate the main principles developed in this paper. The work reported in this paper was supported by the European Commission IST project—PLUTO (Physical Layer DVB Transmission Optimization)

A 14-mW PLL-less receiver in 0.18-μm CMOS for Chinese electronic toll collection standard

This is the accepted manuscript version of the following article: Xiaofeng He, et al., “A 14-mW PLL-less receiver in 0.18-μm CMOS for Chinese electronic toll collection standard”, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, Vol. 61(10): 763-767, August 2014. The final published version is available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6871304/ © 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The design of a 14-mW receiver without phase-locked loop for the Chinese electronic toll collection (ETC) system in a standard 0.18-μm CMOS process is presented in this brief. Since the previously published work was mainly based on vehicle-powered systems, low power consumption was not the primary goal of such a system. In contrast, the presented system is designed for a battery-powered system. Utilizing the presented receiver architecture, the entire receiver only consumes 7.8 mA, at the supply voltage of 1.8 V, which indicates a power saving of at least 38% compared with other state-of-the-art designs for the same application. To verify the performance, the bit error rate is measured to be better than 10-6, which well satisfies the Chinese ETC standard. Moreover, the sensitivity of the designed receiver can be readjusted to -50 dBm, which is required by the standard.Peer reviewe

A Fully-Integrated Reconfigurable Dual-Band Transceiver for Short Range Wireless Communications in 180 nm CMOS

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.A fully-integrated reconfigurable dual-band (760-960 MHz and 2.4-2.5 GHz) transceiver (TRX) for short range wireless communications is presented. The TRX consists of two individually-optimized RF front-ends for each band and one shared power-scalable analog baseband. The sub-GHz receiver has achieved the maximum 75 dBc 3rd-order harmonic rejection ratio (HRR3) by inserting a Q-enhanced notch filtering RF amplifier (RFA). In 2.4 GHz band, a single-ended-to-differential RFA with gain/phase imbalance compensation is proposed in the receiver. A ΣΔ fractional-N PLL frequency synthesizer with two switchable Class-C VCOs is employed to provide the LOs. Moreover, the integrated multi-mode PAs achieve the output P1dB (OP1dB) of 16.3 dBm and 14.1 dBm with both 25% PAE for sub-GHz and 2.4 GHz bands, respectively. A power-control loop is proposed to detect the input signal PAPR in real-time and flexibly reconfigure the PA's operation modes to enhance the back-off efficiency. With this proposed technique, the PAE of the sub-GHz PA is improved by x3.24 and x1.41 at 9 dB and 3 dB back-off powers, respectively, and the PAE of the 2.4 GHz PA is improved by x2.17 at 6 dB back-off power. The presented transceiver has achieved comparable or even better performance in terms of noise figure, HRR, OP1dB and power efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art.Peer reviewe

mm-Wave Silicon ICs: Challenges and Opportunities

Millimeter-waves offer promising opportunities and interesting challenges to silicon integrated circuit and system designers. These challenges go beyond standard circuit design questions and span a broader range of topics including wave propagation, antenna design, and communication channel capacity limits. It is only meaningful to evaluate the benefits and shortcoming of silicon-based mm-wave integrated circuits in this broader context. This paper reviews some of these issues and presents several solutions to them