A 915MHz 120μW-RX/900μW-TX envelope-detection transceiver with 20dB in-band interference tolerance

Abstract

Minimizing the power consumption while maintaining performance is paramount in radio transceiver design for low-power wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. Given a sub-mW power budget, many radios have utilized amplitude modulation and envelope detection to eliminate the need for accurate frequency references and to reduce power consumption [1-4]. However, such radios suffer from poor frequency selectivity. They rely on front-end filters to reject out-of-band interference, while in-band interferers still corrupt the desired signal.