1.2 nW Neuromorphic Enhanced Wake-Up Radio

Low-cost devices with ultra-low-power radio ca-pabilities are a major challenge in smart devices, while a permanently-on receiver is required for smart communication. This paper proposes a wake-up radio with a neuromorphic pre-processing system both biased in weak inversion region. The system can receive a 2.4 GHz signal, demodulate it, and recognize bit patterns based on the spiking frequency of a neuron. Significant performance is obtained with 1.2 nW of total power consumption, which is at least three orders of magnitude less than the conventional RF envelope detectors. Further,
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piking frequency responsiveness over input power suggests that the proposed system can distinguish different signals at 2.4 GHz. The proposed system achieves an energy efficiency of 1.2 pJ/bit with a minimum detectable signal of -27 dBm.