Considerations on the Design of Transceivers for Ambient Internet of Things

Abstract: The Ambient IoT (A-IoT) will introduce trillions of connections and enable low-cost battery-less devices. The A-IoT nodes can achieve low cost ($\sim\$ 0.1$ like RFID tag), sub-1mW average power consumption, $\leq 10$ kbps data rates, maintenance-free working for decades, cm-scale size, and support applications like supply chain and smart agriculture. The transceiver challenges in A-IoT focus on sub-mW receivers and crystal-less clock generation. The paper proposes an approximate low-IF receiver and carrier-auxiliary IF feedback LO synthesizer architecture for Type-B/C A-IoT devices, which tracks the RF carrier frequency and eliminates external crystals. The proposed receiver and LO generator are implemented using 55nm CMOS technology. After locking the LO calibration loop, the receiver sensitivity is better than -88 dBm. The proposed receiver architecture will promote zero-power devices for ubiquitous IoT connectivity, bridging digital and physical worlds.