23.2 A 1mm2 Software-Defined Dual-Mode Bluetooth Transceiver with 10dBm Maximum TX Power and -98.2dBm Sensitivity 2.96mW RX Power at 1Mb/s

The ubiquitous deployment of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) requires integrated, high performance, and low-cost wireless connectivity. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is popular due to low complexity and relaxed carrier-to-interference suppression (C/I) [1], [2]. With a typical 0dBm transmitter (TX) [1], BLE suffers from a limited link budget, susceptibility to jamming in the congested 2.4GHz band, and suboptimal bandwidth utilization. BLE supports a maximum 2Mb/s data rate over 40 channels, whereas Bluetooth Classic Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate (BT-BR/EDR) supports up to 3Mb/s in 79 channels [3] but dissipates high power due to stringent C/I and non-constant envelope modulation (NCEM) formats [4]. Hence, there is a clear need for an optimized Bluetooth Dual-Mode (BT-DM) Transceiver (TRX) that integrates the benefits of low-power and long-range of BLE (e.g., IoT) with the high performance of BT-BR/EDR (e.g., audio, legacy). This work presents a highly reconfigurable BLE, BT-BR/EDR, and IEEE 802.15.4 TRX achieving 0.125-to-3Mb/s data rate with -104.6 to –86.7dBm respective sensitivity, 2.1mW analog power, and +10dBm to -40dBm TX output power while only occupying 1mm
²
area. This is enabled by an innovative software-defined radio (SDR) approach, a pulling-compensated TX, numerous automated calibrations, and ultra-low-power (ULP) circuit techniques.