An Impulse Radio PWM-Based Wireless Data Acquisition Sensor Interface.

Abstract

A sensor interface circuit based on impulse radio pulse width modulation (IR-PWM) is presented for low power and high throughput wireless data acquisition systems (wDAQ) with extreme size and power constraints. Two triple-slope analog-to-time converters (ATC) convert two analog signals, each up to 5 MHz in bandwidth, into PWM signals, and an impulse radio (IR) transmitted (Tx) with an all-digital power amplifier (PA) combines them while preserving the timing information by transmitting impulses at the PWM rising and falling edges. On the receiver (Rx) side, an RF-LNA followed by an envelope detector recovers the incoming impulses, and a T-flipflop reverts the impulse sequence back to PWM to be digitized by a time-to-digital converter (TDC). Detailed analysis and design guideline on ATC was introduced, and a proof-of-concept prototype was fabricated for a capacitive micromachined ultrasound transducer (CMUT) imaging system in a 0.18-μm HV CMOS process, occupying 0.18 mm2 active area and consuming 3.94 mW from a 1.8 V supply. The proposed TDC in this prototype yielded 7-bit resolution, while the entire wDAQ achieved 5.8 effective number of bits (ENOB) at 2 × 10 MS/s.