A symbol-duty-cycled 440-pJ/b impulse radio receiver with 0.57-aJ sensitivity in 130-nm CMOS

This paper presents an ultra-wideband impulse radio (UWB-IR) receiver (RX) for ultralow energy consumption applications. The design of the receiver takes full advantage of the pulsed nature of UWB-IR communication technology aiming at architectural simplicity, avoidance of precise frequency reference generation, and symbol-level duty-cycled operation. The tradeoff between receiver sensitivity and energy-per-bit consumption is briefly addressed for the different design options taken into consideration. A prototype of the receiver was fabricated in 130-nm CMOS technology and tested. The testing results show that the receiver supports a 4.4-Mb/s data rate, with a sensitivity of 0.57 aJ. Thanks to symbol-level duty-cycling and architecture and circuit optimization, such an outstanding performance is attained at an energy consumption of only 440 pJ/b. The receiver robustness against narrowband interferers is also assessed by measuring the blocker power required to degrade the receiver sensitivity by 1 dB: measurement shows a blocker power level that increases from -45 dBm at 6 GHz up to 3 dBm at 2.4 GHz.