A 21.3%-Efficiency Clipped-Sinusoid UWB Impulse Radio Transmitter with Simultaneous Inductive Powering and Data Receiving

TL;DR

This paper presents a highly efficient 21.3% UWB impulse radio transmitter in 130nm CMOS that combines high data rates, low energy consumption, and simultaneous wireless power transfer, suitable for biomedical microsystems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel clipped-sinusoid OOK modulation scheme and demonstrates simultaneous wireless power and data transmission in a compact CMOS design.

Findings

Achieved 21.3% power efficiency at 230 Mbps

Demonstrated BER < 10^-6 at 1 meter

Supported simultaneous wireless power and data transmission

Abstract

An ultra-wide-band impulse-radio (UWB-IR) transmitter (TX) for low-energy biomedical microsystems is presented. High power efficiency is achieved by modulating an LC tank that always resonates in the steady state during transmission. A new clipped-sinusoid scheme is proposed for on-off keying (OOK)-modulation, which is implemented by a voltage clipper circuit with on-chip biasing generation. The TX is designed to provide a high data-rate wireless link within the 3-5 GHz band. The chip was fabricated in 130nm CMOS technology and fully characterized. State-of-the-art power efficiency of 21.3% was achieved at a data-rate of 230Mbps and energy consumption of 21pJ/b. A bit-error-rate (BER) of less than 10^-6 was measured at a distance of 1m without pulse averaging. In addition, simultaneous wireless powering and VCO-based data transmission are supported. A potential extension to a VCO-free all-wireless mode to further reduce the power consumption is also discussed.