Ultra-Low Power Wake-Up Receiver for Location Aware Objects Operating with UWB

Ultra-wide band is one of the most promising localization technologies already and increasingly used in industrial environments. It is also starting to be included in many Internet of Things and mobile devices. The most attractive feature of ultra-wide band for localization and positioning is the achievable centimeter-accuracy that can enable a highly secure spoofing-protected application. On the other hand, the main drawback that still limits its use in battery-operated devices is the high power consumption, especially in idle listening. Today most common approaches use duty cycling, which reduces the overall power consumption at the cost of increased latency. The paper presents a hardware wake-up radio with addressing capability for ultra-wide band communication and ranging. Moreover, the paper introduces a novel protocol that enables the generation of wake-up signals directly with any existing ultra-wide band transceiver, without the requirement of a different radio. The proposed solution achieves −48 dBm of sensitivity with only 100 µW of power consumption. The proposed system enables full asynchronous communication, achieving millisecond latency and always-on capability. Experimental evaluation with a popular commercial transceiver produced by Decawave demonstrates the high energy saving and the effectiveness of the proposed addressing protocol by reducing energy consumption in the order of 100x compared to conventional receivers.