Po-Han Peter Wang, Haowei Jiang, Li Gao, Pinar Sen, Young-Han Kim, Gabriel M. Rebeiz, Patrick P. Mercier, and Drew A. Hall
This paper presents the design of a wake-up receiver (WuRX) that both improves sensitivity and reduces power over prior art through a multi-faceted design featuring an off-chip impedance transformation network with large passive voltage gain, an active envelope detector with high input impedance to facilitate large passive voltage gain, a low-power precision comparator, and a low-leakage digital baseband correlator. Implemented in a 180-nm silicon on insulator CMOS process using dynamic threshold-voltage MOSFET (DTMOS) devices, the OOK-modulated WuRX operates at 113.5 MHz and achieves a sensitivity of -69 dBm, while consuming just 4.5 nW from a 0.4-V supply.