A Sub-mW Cortex-M4 Microcontroller Design for IoT Software-Defined Radios

Abstract

We present an Internet-of-Things (IoT) software-defined radio platform based on an ultra low-power microcontroller. Whereas conventional wireless IoT radios often implement a single protocol, we demonstrate that general-purpose microcontrollers running software implementations of wireless physical layers are a promising solution to increase interoperability of IoT devices. Yet, since IoT devices are often energy-constrained, the underlying challenge is to implement the digital signal processing of the radio in software while maintaining an overall very low power consumption. To overcome this problem, we propose an ultra low-power microcontroller architecture with an ARM Cortex-M4 processor for the protocol-specific computations and a hardware digital front-end for the generic signal processing. The proposed architecture has been prototyped in 28nm FDSOI and the physical layers of the well-known LoRa and Sigfox protocols have been implemented in software. Thanks to the efficient hardware/software partitioning and an ultra-low power digital implementation, experimental evaluations of the microcontroller prototype show sub-mW power consumptions (32 – 332 μW) for the digital signal processing of the software-defined radios.