Open AccessSystem Design of a 2.75-mW Discrete-Time Superheterodyne Receiver for Bluetooth Low Energy
Author(s) -
Sandro Binsfeld Ferreira,
Feng-Wei Kuo,
Masoud Babaie,
Sergio Bampi,
Robert Bogdan Staszewski
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
ieee transactions on microwave theory and techniques
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.372
H-Index - 190
eISSN - 1557-9670
pISSN - 0018-9480
DOI - 10.1109/tmtt.2017.2668407
Subject(s) - fields, waves and electromagnetics
This paper introduces a system-level approach to develop the first-ever fully discrete-time (DT) superheterodyne receiver (RX) for Internet-of-Things applications, such as Bluetooth low energy (BLE). It exploits fast switching speed and low internal capacitances of deep-nanoscale CMOS devices to realize a high intermediate-frequency (IF) architecture based on switched-capacitor-based charge-domain bandpass filtering. Power consumption is minimized by aggressively reducing the size of MOS devices and judiciously applying a sampling-rate decimation. The resultant increase in the flicker noise is mitigated by placing the IF frequency beyond the flicker corner frequency. Likewise, the decimation-induced aliasing is mitigated by DT filtering of preceding stages. The BLE RX is fully standard-compliant and achieves a record-low-power consumption of 2.75 mW (including its local oscillator) while delivering the state-of-the-art performance: 6.5-dB noise figure and -19-dBm third-order input intercept point, with a direct antenna connection and thus without the typical external bandpass filters.