Towards a versatile energy-efficient wireless transmitter design for bio-medical applications

This paper presents a versatile transmitter (TX) architecture. The core of this architecture is based on the phase selection (PS) operation, where the TX signal is generated by selecting proper phase to the TX output. The straightforward selection operation leads to energy-efficient data transmission. This architecture has been previously adopted in realizing energy-efficient TXs for various bio-medical applications. It has been demonstrated that these TXs can support various PSK and FSK modulations schemes and achieved good energy efficiency. In addition to highlighting some of previous works, new results of a 2.4-GHz TX that supports QAM scheme to enhance the spectral efficiency, is presented. Fabricated in a 90-nm CMOS process, the TX demonstrated an energy efficiency as low as 0.079 nJ/bit.