Energy-Efficient Wireless Transmissions for Battery-Less Vehicle Tire Pressure Monitoring System

This paper presents an energy-efficient wireless transmission scheme for battery-less vehicle tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS). Our proposed transmission scheme includes a wake-up communication link with 125-kHz carrier frequency and a data communication link with 433-MHz carrier frequency. Considering the TPMS application requirements and the special nature of the vehicle environment, we derive the relevant circuit parameters. In order to verify the reliability of the wireless communication system under the derived circuit parameters, we design an in-tire data transmitter and wake-up receiver. The 125-kHz wake-up receiver adopts dual-channel to improve the communication reliability and logarithmic amplifiers to achieve ASK demodulation and dynamic range compression. The receiver is implemented in 0.35-μm high voltage (HV) BCD process. Experiment results show that typical power consumption of the receiver is no more than 5 μA under 3.3 V supply voltage; the maximum data rate is 35 kb/s with 0.5 mVpp sensitivity. On the other hand, the data transmitter is implemented in 0.18-μm MMRF process. Experiment results show that the typical power consumption is 7.3 mA under 1.8 V supply voltage, and the emission power is -10 dBm@433.92 MHz with a phase noise of -103 dBc/Hz@300 kHz. System level experiments demonstrate that the proposed wireless transmission scheme fulfills the vehicle TPMS requirements. The data transmitter and wake-up receiver can communicate with the commercial data receiver and wake-up transmitter in the range of 20 m, which meets the requirements of most vehicles.