A passive 461 MHz AlN-CMOS RF front-end for event-driven wakeup receivers

This paper presents a fully passive front-end operating at 461 MHz, as a building block for implementation of wakeup receivers in sensor networks. We use an Aluminum Nitride (AlN) microelectromechanical system (MEMS) resonator for impedance transformation in order to achieve passive voltage boost at the input of a quadratic envelope detector, fabricated in a 130nm CMOS process. Each individual block is co-designed to maximize overall voltage gain so that the resulting dc output can be detected by ultra-low power (ULP) digital circuitry. Integration of these two technologies results in the reduction of node size and achieves superior performance at higher frequencies.