A 4 × 4 × 4-mm3 Fully Integrated Sensor-to-Sensor Radio using Carrier Frequency Interlocking IF Receiver with -94 dBm Sensitivity

Abstract

Ultra-low power mm-scale IoT platforms enable newly emerging applications such as pervasive agricultural monitoring and bio-sensing. Although there is an increasing interest in sensor-to-sensor communication, as defined in Bluetooth v5.0, prior research in mm-scale wireless systems is mostly limited to asymmetric sensor-to-gateway communication. This paper introduces a 4×4×4 mm3 fully integrated radio system that integrates a transceiver chip, antenna, power management unit and baseband processor for sensor-to-sensor mesh networks. The proposed system uses a low power 32 kHz reference frequency and a carrier frequency interlocking IF receiver. It achieves -94 dBm sensitivity with 97 µW power consumption and -12.6 dBm EIRP for sensor-to-sensor mesh network communication.