Design of a Low-power Ultrasound Transceiver for Underwater Sensor Networks

Abstract

This paper presents an ultrasound (US) transceiver including a transmitter and a receiver for underwater wireless sensor nodes, where low-power operation is desired to extend the life-time of the network. A system-level analysis of the underwater communication has been performed by taking into account the underwater propagation and the medium charac- teristics to show their impact on the overall performance. In addition, a low-noise amplffier using an inverter-based topology has been introduced to ensure power efficiency of the receiver, where a bulk-feedback method is proposed to stabilize the output bias point of the inverter. Simulation results show that the proposed transceiver has a scalable power consumption from $1.95\mu W$ to $10.4\mu W$ while achieving $100\mu V$ to $20\mu V$ sensitivity at a $10^{-3}$ BER level.