Ultra-Low Power 2.4 GHz Receiver Design Techniques for IoT Applications

This paper presents ultra-low power completely on-chip radio frequency (RF) receiver design techniques for high-speed Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications using TSMC 40nm CMOS process. Two RF receivers are designed to present the advantages of coherent and non-coherent detection in the receiver path. The proposed non-coherent detection receiver (Rx I) utilizes a novel pseudo-balun envelope detector and a comparator to decode on-off keying (OOK) modulated signal at a 200-kbps data rate in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. The simulated results show that the receiver can achieve -52 dBm sensitivity for only 13.3 nW of power consumption from 0.8/0.5 V supply. The proposed coherent detection receiver (Rx II) utilizes a mixer-first low intermediate frequency (IF) receiver architecture with an in-built frequency synthesizer to decode OOK modulated signal at a 5 Mbps data rate in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. The simulated results show that the receiver can achieve -80 dBm sensitivity for only 105 μW of power consumption from a 0.9/1 V supply.