A 41.5 pJ/b, 2.4GHz Digital-Friendly Orthogonally Tunable Transceiver SoC with 3-decades of Energy-Performance Scalability

Abstract

Adaptive communication for Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) technologies is becoming increasingly popular due to the large power-performance trade-offs and highly dynamic channel conditions. Path loss, low signal to noise ratio (SNR) in the channel and network congestion adversely affect the data communication, each of which can be taken care of using different strategies such as reducing the data rate (for reducing congestion), increasing the output power (for increased path loss) and application of error correction coding (ECC, for low SNR). In this paper, we present a digital-friendly Transceiver SoC consisting of an RF-DAC based transmitter with orthogonally tunable output power, data rate and ECC that enables optimum system level bit error rate (BER) and energy for over 3-orders of energy-performance scalability, along with an ultra-low-power OOK receiver that receives the transmitter's control bits from a nearby base station for closed-loop control. The data rate and ECC control is achieved through a digital baseband, while a tapped capacitor matching network controls the output power. The energy efficiency of the transmitter is 27.6pJ/b at 10MSps and at 0.8V supply (~9X improvement over state-of-the-art), while the entire SoC (Transmitter+OOK receiver for controller feedback) consumes only 41.5pJ/b.