Abstract
In this 5G era, wireless communication technology plays a vital role to send and receive information over the air. The conveyance of information is possible with the help of a transmitter and a receiver combinedly termed a transceiver. In the fast-progressing world of Internet-of- Things (IoT) technology, there is an immense demand for large amounts of data to be transferred across multiple devices in a shorter period almost as if the data is present on all the devices. In order to support this demand, it is important to focus on the transceiver architecture and the challenges to design the transceiver. A few challenges that are considered in the scope of this work are power consumption, system data throughput, and receiver sensitivity. The architecture of a transceiver is determined by the primary consideration of desired modulation scheme which will be based on the scope of the application. This work mainly focuses on exploring, implementing, and validating some novel and unique ideas of very low-power radio frequency (RF) design techniques for a wide range of IoT applications. In this work, the frequency range in the 2.4GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band is chosen. This work explores the design of completely on-chip low power non-coherent and coherent receivers that support the On-Off Keying (OOK) modulation scheme and also the design of a very low power dB-linear programmable-gain amplifier (PGA) that accomplishes Bluetooth low energy (BLE) standards. The non-coherent receiver uses a pseudo-balun center-symmetric Dickson detector to achieve a sensitivity of -35dBm and support up to 400kbps data rate signals at 2.4GHz while consuming only 11.7nW. The coherent receiver uses a pseudo-differential mixer-first receiver architecture and a robust local oscillator (LO) to achieve a sensitivity of -60dBm and -65dBm for 5Mbps and 1Mbps data rate at 2.4GHz while consuming only 178µW and 119µW respectively. The cell-based PGA achieves an extensive dB-linear gain range of 76dB with a gain step of 2.45dB for 32 gain settings and a gain error of less than ±0.5dB. The PGA consumes only 0.167mW of power from a 1.1V supply in maximum gain condition. The PGA is integrated into a standard Bluetooth Low-energy (BLE) receiver to validate the compatibility of the proposed PGA and the BLE 4 receiver channel selectivity measurements are performed and achieved a 14dB adjacent channel rejection (ACR). The implementation of all the works presented in this thesis is realized in 40nm CMOS technology.