A Low-Power WLAN CMOS LNA for Wireless Sensor Network Wake-Up Receiver Applications

Abstract

Wireless communication integration is related to many challenges such as reliability, quality of service, communication range, and energy consumption. As the overall performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN) will be improved if the capacity of each sensor node is optimized, several techniques are used to fine-tune the various circuits of each node. In recent works, the wake-up receiver nodes have been introduced to minimize latencies without increasing energy consumption. To overcome the sensitivity of wake-up receiver limitations, a design of a low-noise amplifier (LNA) with several design specifications is required. This article discusses the relevance of the wake-up receiver in WSN applications and provides a brief study of this component. An LNA design for WSN wake-up receiver applications is presented. The challenging task of the LNA design is to provide equitable trade-off performances such as noise figure, gain, power consumption, impedance matching, and linearity. The LNA circuit is designed for wireless personal area network (WLAN) standards utilizing RF-TSMC CMOS 0.18 μm. Two innovative techniques are applied to the LNA topology to improve its performance: forward body biasing is used to reduce power consumption by 11.43 mW, and substrate resistance is added to reduce noise by 1.8 dB. The developed LNA achieves a noise figure of 1.6 dB and a power gain of 21.7 dB at 5.2 GHz. At 0.6 V, the designed LNA dissipates 0.87 mW.