People:
Simone Gambini, Prof. Elad Alon, Prof. Jan Rabaey
Significant
interest has recently arisen in ubiquitous wireless
nodes capable of communication with each other over
relatively short distances. To enable truly
ubiquitous deployment, the energy requirements of the
wireless transceivers within these nodes must be set to
the lowest possible levels. Thus, the goal of this
project is to develop a wireless transceiver tailored
for data communication at 1Mb/s over 5cm of distance.
Such a transceiver should integrate the antenna and the active
circuitry in a 1cm2 planar assembly, and requires an
average energy consumption lower than 60pJ/Bit in both
the receive and transmit modes.
To minimize cost, the
communication system is designed to operate without a
precision timing element, but rather exploits the
ability of modern CMOS to build inaccurate but very low
power high-frequency timing generators. In order
to achieve all of the goals for this transceiver, the system carrier frequency and
antenna are chosen simultaneously so as to realize minimum
channel loss, allowing a simplified transceiver circuit
architecture and hence drastically lower power
dissipation.
Fig. 1: Antenna and carrier frequency optimization
Fig. 2:
Optimization results
Fig. 3: Proposed Transceiver architecture
