Enhancing Wake-Up Receiver Sensitivity Beyond –68 dBm Without Additional Power Consumption

Abstract

Wake-up receivers (WuRxs) enable wireless, low-latency communication with greatly improved power efficiency. However, this efficiency comes at the cost of reduced sensitivity and communication range. Improving WuRx sensitivity without increasing power consumption remains a major challenge. Many existing approaches introduce radio frequency (RF) amplifiers, but these typically require power in the milliwatt range. Only a few designs have achieved sensitivity values better than –65 dBm with a passive RF front-end. In this contribution, we propose a passive LF amplifier based on an inductor–capacitor resonance circuit. Using this method, we improve the sensitivity of the WuRx prototype from –62.5 to –68.6 dBm, while keeping the power consumption constant at 10.3 $\mathrm{\mu }$W and maintaining a low latency of 13.5 ms. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the most sensitive WuRx reported that uses a passive RF front-end from 434 MHz to 2.45 GHz with such low latency.