A 55uW 2.4GHz wake-up receiver with offset-based peak detection achieving −90dBm sensitivity for IoT applications

The paper proposes a 2.4 GHz ultra-low power wake-up receiver (WuRX) with offset-based peak detection and mixer-first based radio frequency (RF) front-end for IoT applications. The mixer-first based front-end eliminates RF modules to reduce power consumption. Based on the transparency of the passive mixing switches, a 2-path passive mixer (2-PPM) constructs the high-Q band-pass filter (BPF) at the RF port to improve out-of-band blocker rejection. The offset-based peak detection circuit adaptively extracts the reference voltage for the subsequent comparator according to the real-time signal amplitude of envelope detection, which eliminates the misjudgment of the comparator and improves the accuracy of demodulation. For low power consumption, a ring oscillator is used to generate the local oscillator (LO) signal and the frequency calibration scheme combined with coarse tuning and fine tuning is employed to improve the frequency stability, which completes 10-bit frequency tuning with 2 MHz resolution. Designed in TSMC 28 nm CMOS technology, the mixer-first based front-end achieves a conversion gain of 42 dB and a noise figure of 11.9 dB at 2.4 GHz, an S11 less than −15dB during 2.4–2.5 GHz. The frequency calibration scheme for the ring oscillator completes the 512 MHz dynamic range with a 2 MHz frequency tuning step. The WuRX can achieve −90dBm sensitivity with 55 μ W power consumption at 0.6 V supply voltage and the chip area of 0.19 mm × 0.24 mm.