An Ultra-Low-Power Injection Locked Transmitter for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents the principles for designing low-power transmitters for wireless sensor networks. Based on these principles, an injection-locked transmitter is implemented in a standard 0.13-mum CMOS process and packaged using chip-on-board assembly. The transmitter utilizes a film bulk acoustic resonator (FBAR) to obtain a stable carrier at 1.9 GHz. At 0 dBm output power, the transmitter achieves an efficiency of 32% at 50 kb/s and 28% at 156 kb/s. With 50% on-off keying, the transmitter consumes 1.6 and 1.8 mW, respectively