Table Of ContentACSP · Analog Circuits And Signal Processing
Zhicheng Lin
Pui-In Mak (Elvis)
Rui Paulo Martins
Ultra-Low-Power
and Ultra-Low-Cost
Short-Range Wireless
Receivers in Nanoscale
CMOS
Analog Circuits and Signal Processing
Series editors
Mohammed Ismail, Dublin, USA
Mohamad Sawan, Montreal, Canada
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7381
Zhicheng Lin • Pui-In Mak (Elvis)
Rui Paulo Martins
Ultra-Low-Power
and Ultra-Low-Cost
Short-Range Wireless
Receivers in Nanoscale
CMOS
123
Zhicheng Lin Rui Paulo Martins
State-Key Laboratory of Analog and State-Key Laboratory of Analog and
Mixed-Signal VLSI and FST-ECE Mixed-Signal VLSI and FST-ECE
University of Macau University of Macau
Macao Macao
China China
and
Pui-In Mak (Elvis)
State-Key Laboratory of Analog and Instituto Superior Técnico
Mixed-Signal VLSI and FST-ECE Universidade de Lisboa
University of Macau Lisbon
Macao Portugal
China
ISSN 1872-082X ISSN 2197-1854 (electronic)
Analog Circuits and Signal Processing
ISBN 978-3-319-21523-5 ISBN 978-3-319-21524-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-21524-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015944203
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Preface
With the continued maturation of the Internet of things (IoT) for smart cities, a huge
market has been opening up for short-range wireless communications, especially
for ubiquitous wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is expected that by 2020, the
IoT market will be close to hundreds of billion dollars (annually *16 billions).
These WSNs consist of spatial distribution of highly autonomous short-range radios
to sense and collect the environmental data. The large number of units present in the
network relaxes the sensitivity of a single receiver but, at the same time, demands
ultra-low-power (ULP) and ultra-low-cost (ULC) radio chips to increase the density
of elements and autonomous lifetime.
This book focuses on ULP and ULC receiver circuit techniques, and attempts to
alleviate the trade-off between ULP and ULC. The rapid downscaling of CMOS
offers sufficiently high fT and low VT favoring the design of ULP wireless receivers
by: (1) cascading of radio frequency (RF) and baseband (BB) circuits under an
ultra-low-voltage supply; (2) cascoding of RF and BB circuits in the current domain
for current reuse. Based on these observations, two receivers according to the IEEE
802.15.4 (ZigBee/WPAN) standard have been designed, suitable for the worldwide
available 2.4-GHz ISM band. Although current-reuse receivers can lead to power
savings, they normally demand a high supply voltage and are optimized for nar-
rowband only. To surmount this, by processing the RF and BB signals in an
orthogonal approach, the third design is a function-reuse wideband-tunable receiver
for sub-GHz multiple ISM bands. This is realized elegantly by employing an
N-path passive mixer as the feedback path of the low-noise amplifier (LNA) to
concurrently amplify the RF (common mode) and BB (differential mode) signals.
The described ULP and ULC architectures constitute attractive solutions for
emerging WSNs suitable for different ISM bands. We hope you will enjoy reading
this book.
Macao, China Zhicheng Lin
May 2015 Pui-In Mak (Elvis)
Rui Paulo Martins
vii
Contents
1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Short-Range Wireless Communications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.1 The IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee, IEEE 802.15.6
and Bluetooth Low Energy ULP Standards . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 Design Considerations for ULP and ULC Short-Range
Wireless RXs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2.1 Power Supply (VDD) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2.2 Carrier Frequency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2.3 NB Versus UWB. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3 Main Targets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.4 Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2 Design and Implementation of Ultra-Low-Power ZigBee/WPAN
Receiver. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.1 Proposed “Split-LNTA + 50 % LO” Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.2 Comparison of “Split-LNTA + 50 % LO”
and “Single-LNTA + 25 % LO” Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.2.1 Gain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2.2 NF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.2.3 IIP3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.2.4 Current- and Voltage-Mode Operations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.3 Circuit Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.3.1 Impedance Up Conversion Matching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.3.2 Mixer-TIA Interface Biased for Impedance
Transfer Filtering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.3.3 RC-CR Network and VCO Co-Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.4 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.5 Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
ix
x Contents
3 A 2.4-GHz ZigBee Receiver Exploiting
an RF-to-BB-Current-Reuse Blixer + Hybrid Filter Topology
in 65-nm CMOS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.2 Proposed Current-Reuse Receiver Architecture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.3 Circuit Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.3.1 Wideband Input-Matching Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.3.2 Balun-LNA with Active Gain Boost and Partial
Noise Canceling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.3.3 Double-Balanced Mixers Offering Output Balancing . . . . 39
3.3.4 Hybrid Filter 1st Half—Current-Mode Biquad
with IF Noise-Shaping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.3.5 Hybrid Filter 2nd Half—Complex-Pole Load. . . . . . . . . . 42
3.3.6 Current-Mirror VGA and RC-CR PPF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
3.3.7 VCO, Dividers and LO Buffers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.4 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.5 Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Appendix A: S11 ≤ 10 dB Bandwidth Versus the Q Factor (Qn)
of the Input-Matching Network (Fig. 3.4a) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Appendix B: NF of the Balun-LNA Versus the Gain (Gm,CS)
of the CS Branch with AGB (Fig. 3.4a). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
4 Analysis and Modeling of a Gain-Boosted N-Path
Switched-Capacitor Bandpass Filter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4.1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4.2 GB-BPF Using an Ideal RLC Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
4.2.1 RF Filtering at Vi and Vo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
4.2.2 –3-dB Bandwidth at Vi and Vo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
4.2.3 Derivation of the Rp-Lp-Cp Model
Using the LPTV Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
4.3 Harmonic Selectivity, Harmonic Folding and Noise . . . . . . . . . . 67
4.3.1 Harmonic Selectivity and Harmonic Folding . . . . . . . . . . 67
4.3.2 Noise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.3.3 Intuitive Equivalent Circuit Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
4.4 Design Example. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
4.5 Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Appendix A: The Derivation of Eq. (4.18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Appendix B: The Derivation of Lp and Cp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Contents xi
5 A Sub-GHz Multi-ISM-Band ZigBee Receiver
Using Function-Reuse and Gain-Boosted N-Path Techniques
for IoT Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
5.1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
5.2 ULP Techniques: Current Reuse, ULV and Proposed
Function Reuse + Gain-Boosted N-Path SC Network . . . . . . . . . 83
5.3 Gain-Boosted N-Path SC Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5.3.1 N-Path Tunable Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5.3.2 AC-Coupled N-Path Tunable Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
5.3.3 Function-Reuse Receiver Embedding a Gain-Boosted
N-Path SC Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
5.4 Low-Voltage Current-Reuse VCO-Filter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
5.5 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
5.6 Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Appendix A: Output-Noise PSD at BB for the N-Path
Tunable Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Appendix B: Derivation and Modeling of BB Gain and Output Noise
for the Function-Reuse Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
6.1 General Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
6.2 Suggestions for Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
