On-chip ultra low power optical wake-up receiver for wireless sensor nodes targeting structural health monitoring

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of distributed nodes deployed for monitoring the physical conditions and organizing collected data at the central control unit. Power consumption is the challenges in WSN as the network consists of wireless sensor nodes becomes denser. By utilizing WSN and visible light technology, a simple health monitoring system design can be approached that are smaller in size, faster and lower power consumption. This work focuses on design a low power optical wake-up receiver to reduce the energy consumption of each node in WSN. A wake-up receiver is designed to be always-on for detecting incoming signal and switches on the stand by protocol controller and WSN network for data transmission process. The characteristic of optical transmission and functional circuit of a wake-up receiver has been investigated. A low power optical wake-up receiver has been designed in 180nm Silterra CMOS process technology. The proposed wake-up receiver consumes only 443pW in standby mode and 1.89nW in active mode. The proposed optical wake-up receiver drastically reduces the power consumption by more than one third compared to other wake-up receivers which could be a milestone in the medical field if successfully conducted.