An Efficient Low-power Wake-up Receiver Architecture for Power Saving for Transmitter and Receiver Communications

For power-limited wireless sensor networks, energy efficiency is a critical concern. Receiving packages is proven to be one of the most power-consuming tasks in a WSN. To address this problem the asynchronous communication is based on wake-up receivers. The proposed receiver circuit can detect carrier signals inside the 868 MHz band. Reliable signal detection at 10 m was achieved with a total power consumption of 4.2 μW. Two use cases of this low-power receiver were introduced. First the wake-up receiver and second as a collision avoidance circuit. Because of its low power consumption savings of factor 7000 can be estimated compared to integrated solutions of commercially available radio transceivers.