Design of a low-power ZigBee receiver front-end for wireless sensors

This paper presents the design and simulation results of a low-cost, low-power CMOS receiver. The receiver is intended to be used for the ZigBee standard specially proposed for wireless sensor networks. The proposed system consists of a single-ended input, differential output LNA, followed by a pair of double-balanced passive mixers. After down-conversion, a pair of low-power, variable gain low-pass filters is used for channel selection. The design is made using 130-nm CMOS technology with 1.2-V supply. Simulation results show that the receiver can achieve a sensitivity level of -97-dBm while consuming only 6-mA.