Low-power wideband receiver front-end design for short-range IoT applications

Abstract

The fast growth of the internet-of-things (IoT) promises the establishment of a smart environment including home automation, health monitoring, location tracking etc. Billions of IoT devices are needed to achieve this goal and connect the objects around us. This introduces a need to develop low-power IoT devices. Accordingly, reducing by a fraction of the power consumption in each IoT device can lead to an important overall energy use reduction globally. undoubtedly, the RF transceiver plays a significant role to define the overall power consumption of the IoT module. The aim of this work is to develop a low-power and wideband current-reuse receiver front-end for IoT applications. The wideband feature covers several frequency bands to reduce the number of receivers required. To do this, first, a literature review is presented. It focuses on the low-power receiver design techniques and discusses the circuits in detail. Following the literature review, A detailed design tutorial including the design procedures and characterization results is presented to provide a systematic design approach of the current-reuse receiver front-end to breakdown the circuit to sub-blocks and perform the design as a conventional receiver architecture. A low-power RF-to-BB current-reuse receiver front-end using an active-inductor and 1/ f noise-cancellation techniques for L-band applications is presented. The active-inductor improves the receiver noise-figure at higher frequencies and the noise-cancellation technique suppresses the low frequency noise. Both active-inductor and 1/ f noise-cancellation techniques help enhance the receiver noise figure. The effect of the metal fill on the performance is studied in measurements that shows the notable improvement in the noise figure performance. A comparison of an off-chip differential and an LC Balun employing the same current-reuse receiver front-end with and without an on-chip inductor is presented to evaluate the performance using different matching networks and frequencies. This demonstrates that the receiver can be tuned to any frequency band by adjusting the matching network. Overall, this thesis describes the study, design and characterization of low-power and wideband current-reuse receiver front-ends that can be tuned for any frequency band to be used for different IoT applications. The active-inductor and 1/ f noise-cancellation techniques introduced in this work improve the performance of the receiver and allow it to maintain its performance at higher frequencies even in a relatively large 130 nm CMOS process.

Date	9 Dec 2022
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Frédéric Nabki (Supervisor)