Short-range zigbee compatible receiver with near-threshold digital baseband
AssigneeThe Regents of the University of Michigan
InventorsOsama U. Khan, David D. Wentzloff
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Abstract
An 8.1 nJ/bit 2.4 GHz receiver with integrated digital baseband supporting Q-QPSK DSSS modulation compliant with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is presented that targets short-range, Internet of Things applications (IoTs). The sensitivity of a wireless communication receiver in general trades with power consumption. This receiver exploits this tradeoff to achieve a total power consumption of 2.02 mW including ADCs and digital baseband processing, at a sensitivity of −52.5 dBm at 250 Kbps. The energy-efficiency of the radio frequency (RF) front-end alone is nearly two times better than the prior art. The receiver was fabricated in 65 nm CMOS with an area of 0.86 mm2.
Claims20
A method for operating a short-range receiver with a digital baseband processor, comprising:
- receiving, by a digital baseband processor in the receiver, a network data packet over a data link of a wireless network;
- sampling, by the digital baseband processor, a portion of the network data packet at a given sampling rate;
- determining, by the digital baseband processor, a metric indicative of quality of the data link over which the network data packet was received;
- lowering, by the digital baseband processor, the given sampling rate of the network data packet to a reduced uniform or non-uniform sampling rate, where the reduced sampling rate is set inversely to quality of the data link and with a value lower than the given sampling rate;
- and
- processing, by the digital baseband processor, remainder of the network data packet at the reduced sampling rate.
A method for operating a short-range receiver with a near-threshold digital baseband processor, comprising:
- receiving, by the receiver, a protocol data unit over a channel in a wireless network;
- sampling, by the receiver, a portion of the data unit at a given sampling rate;
- determining, by the receiver, a metric indicative of quality the channel over which the data unit was received;
- comparing, by the receiver, the metric to a threshold;
- processing the remainder of the data unit at a reduced uniform or non-uniform sampling rate when the metric is above the threshold, where the reduced sampling rate is lower than given sampling rate and the processing of the data unit includes
- ranking samples from the portion of the data unit according to energy level;
- selecting a subset of the samples having highest energy level, where the number of selected samples correlates to the reduced sampling rate;
- sampling the remainder of the network data packet in accordance with the selected subset of samples;
- and
- processing the remainder of the data unit at the given sampling rate when the metric is below the threshold.
A short-range receiver operating in a wireless network, comprising:
- an RF front-end circuit configured to receive an RF analog signal from an antenna and operates to shift the RF analog signal to an intermediate signal having a different frequency;
- an analog-to-digital converter configured to receive the intermediate signal from the RF front-end circuit and convert the intermediate signal to a digital signal;
- and
- a digital baseband processor configured to receive the digital signal from the analog-to-digital converter and processes the digital signal at a prescribed sampling rate, the baseband processor includes
- a link quality module that determines a metric indicative of quality of data link over which the RF analog signal was received and set the prescribed sampling rate to a value that is inversely related to the quality of the data link;
- and
- a decoder that samples the digital signal at the prescribed sampling rate and outputs a sequence of data bits derived from the digital signal.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.