Po-Han Peter Wang, Haowei Jiang, Li Gao, Pinar Sen, Young-Han Kim, Gabriel M. Rebeiz, Patrick P. Mercier, and Drew A. Hall
A wake-up receiver (WuRX) that achieves -80.5-dBm sensitivity with only 6.1 nW of power is presented. High sensitivity is achieved via a passive pseudo-balun envelope detector (ED) with a high input impedance ( >750 kΩ ‖ <1.4 pF) that enables a 30.6-dB passive voltage gain transformer while providing differential output and improving the conversion gain by 2× compared to a conventional single-ended input passive ED for a given input capacitance. The WuRX is implemented in a 180-nm CMOS process and operates from a 0.4-V supply.