An ultra-low power predistortion-based FHSS transmitter

In the new era of personal communications, the energy available for a wireless node is the limiting factor. Furthermore wireless links should be robust even in the harsh indoor environment where fading, attenuation and interferences can be severe. Spread-spectrum techniques are largely used to have a robust link, while frequency-hopping (FH) is the most suitable for low data-rate applications. Unfortunately state-of-the-art FH systems are still far too complex and too power hungry to be implemented in a self contained wireless node. The proposed architecture simplifies considerably the hardware requirements for the hopping synthesizer achieving a current consumption of only 900 muA (excluding the output buffer) from a 1.8 V power supply