An Ultra Low-Power CMOS Transceiver Using Various Low-Power Techniques for LR-WPAN Applications

In this work, we implemented and evaluated a fully integrated 2.4 GHz CMOS RF transceiver using various low-power techniques for low-rate wireless personal area network (IEEE 802.15.4 LR_WPAN) applications in 0.18-μm CMOS technology. In order to achieve an ultra low power consumption, a RC oscillator (OSC) operating below 200 nA, a regulator operating below 200 nA for sleep mode, a quick start block for the crystal oscillator, a passive wake-up circuit, a LNA with negative gm, a current bleeding mixer, and a stacked VCO are all implemented in this transceiver. The transmitter achieves less than 5.0% error vector magnitude (EVM) at 5 dBm output, and the receiver sensitivity is -101 dBm. The sensitivity of the wake-up block is -29.8 dBm. The current consumption is below 14.3 mA for the data receiving mode, 16.7 mA for the transmitter, and less than 600 nA for the sleep mode from a 1.8 V power supply. That is considered to be lowest for the 2.4 GHz CMOS ZigBee transceiver compared to open literature results.