A Schottky-Diode-Based Wake-Up Receiver for IoT Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-power, two-phase wake-up receiver for IoT that uses integrated Schottky diodes and a data-locked oscillator to reduce power consumption and false alarms, enabling efficient system activation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel two-phase wake-up receiver design with integrated Schottky diodes and a data-locked oscillator, achieving low power and high sensitivity in CMOS technology.

Findings

Achieves 8.45 pJ/bit energy efficiency

Operates at -50 dBm sensitivity

Consumes 1.69 μW average power

Abstract

This paper presents an always-on low-power wake-up receiver (WuRx) that activates the remainder of the system when a wake-up signal is detected. The proposed receiver has two phases of waking up. The first phase uses an integrated CMOS Schottky diodes to detect the signal power at a low bias current. The approach dissipates low quiescent power and allows the reuse of the design in multiple frequency bands with only modifying the matching network. In the second phase, a data-locked startable oscillator is proposed to correlate the received data with a target signature. This design eliminates the area and power dissipation of an external crystal oscillator and only turns on when the second phase is activated. By correlating to a target signature, the second phase also reduces the probability of a false alarm (PFA) that would otherwise wake up the high-power bulk of the system. The two-phase approach leads to significant reduction in average power consumption when compared to a single-phase design. This implementation targets sub-ms wake-up latency and operates in the unlicensed band at a 750-MHz carrier frequency with a data rate of 200 kbps. The design achieves $\sim$8.45pJ/bit and $<$-50 dBm of input sensitivity and average power of 1.69$\mu$W. The system is implemented in 65-nm CMOS technology and occupies an area of 1mm$\times$0.75mm.