A 0.7-V Sub-mW Type-II Phase-Tracking Bluetooth Low Energy Receiver in 28-nm CMOS

Suoping Hu,Peng Chen,Robert Bogdan Staszewski,Philip Quinlan

doi:10.1109/tcsi.2021.3070782

Suoping Hu, Peng Chen + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1109/tcsi.2021.3070782

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Abstract

We present an architecture of a Bluetooth low energy (BLE)-compliant receiver which, for the first time ever, breaks the 1mW barrier of power consumption. It is based on a type-II phase-tracking loop and addresses the mutual magnetic coupling between on-chip inductors of a digitally controller oscillator (DCO) and low-noise transconductance amplifier (LNTA), which causes RX performance degradation in the prior-art implementations. An inverter-based inductor-free LNTA is employed instead. The resulting adjacent channel rejection (ACR) improves by 1.5/2.5dB at 2/3MHz offset. By further leveraging current-reuse and switched-capacitor circuitry, this RX achieves the best-in-class FoM of 183.2dB with sensitivity of -93.2dBm. Thanks to the single-channel topology, the proposed RX occupies tiny area of 0.48mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> in 28-nm CMOS.

Highlights

W ITH the increasingly high demand for Internet-ofThings (IoT) devices, there is a strong push for ultralow power (ULP) and ultra-low voltage (ULV) operation of wireless nodes [1]–[6]
The objective of our work is to address the remaining mutual coupling issue and to break the 1 mW power consumption barrier of a Bluetooth low energy (BLE) compliant receiver
Apart from the digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) running at 0.22 V, the RX operates at 0.7-V supply, which is the lowest supply voltage among CMOS BLE RXs

Summary

Introduction

W ITH the increasingly high demand for Internet-ofThings (IoT) devices, there is a strong push for ultralow power (ULP) and ultra-low voltage (ULV) operation of wireless nodes [1]–[6]. Several sub-mW Cartesian receivers have been reported, yet featuring sensitivity worse than −90 dBm [10]–[12] or only reporting an RF front-end design without counting the power of Manuscript received December 21, 2020; revised March 1, 2021 and March 28, 2021; accepted March 30, 2021.

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