Analysis of Circuit Noise and Non-Ideal Filtering Impact on Energy Detection Based Ultra-Low-Power Radios Performance

Abstract

With the coming of age of the Internet of Things, demand on ultra-low power (ULP) radios will continue to boost tremendously. Circuit imperfections, especially in power hungry blocks, i.e., the local oscillators (LO) and band pass filters (BPFs), pose a real challenge for ULP radios designers considering their tight power budget. This brief presents an investigation on the effects of circuit non-idealities on the bit-error rate performance of on-off keying and Gaussian frequency-shift keying energy detection (ED)-based wakeup radios. In particular, this brief analyzes the impact of phase noise and frequency offset in the LO, BPFs bandwidth and roll-off, noise figure on ULP receivers’ performance. This brief contributes to the ongoing research in designing ULP wireless nodes by demonstrating the tradeoffs between these non-idealities and the receiver’s sensitivity level and selectivity and show some design guidelines for ED-based ULP radios.