A pulsed decimal technique for single-channel, dynamic signaling for IoT applications

Pulsed-Index Communication (PIC) is a recent technique for single-channel communication which is based on the principle of transferring the indices of only the ON bits in the form of a series of pulse streams. In this paper, we present a modified version of PIC which is based on the same underlying idea but with key improvements in data rate and reliability. The proposed technique is called Pulsed Decimal Communication (PDC). Like PIC, PDC is a protocol for single-channel, high-data rate, low-power dynamic signaling that does not require any clock and data recovery. It however achieves higher data rates by introducing a three-step algorithm, comprising a segmentation, an encoding, and a sub-segmentation step. The segmentation step is used to split the data word into smaller segments and therefore smaller decimal numbers to represent them. The encoding step reduces the number of ON bits in the data and relocates them to lower indices. The sub-segmentation step is used to split further the segments into smaller sub-segments. The complete process reduces the number of pulses required to transmit binary data, thus improving the data rate. Compared with PIC, PDC achieves a 78% improvement in data rate and is more reliable as it eliminates the variations in the number of symbols to be transmitted. An FPGA and an ASIC (65nm technology) implementation of the protocol show that the low-power operation and small footprint of PIC are maintained in PDC, which consumes around 25of power at a clock frequency of 25MHz with a gate count of approximately 2150.