A BAW based Transceiver used as Wake-Up Receiver

Markus Dielacher, Josef Prainsack, Martin Flatscher, Rainer Matischek, Thomas Herndl Inneon Technologies Austria AG, Graz, Austria Wolfgang Pribyl Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

Abstract
This work presents a BAW based transceiver which can be used as a wake up receiver. The low power consumption can be achieved by using a high duty cycle. In contrast to typical quartz based systems, the BAW based approach allows for a high repetition rate of the duty cycle, which is not possible with conventional systems. The sensitivity of the receiver is -90 dBm at a current consumption of 8 mA in active mode.

1 Wireless Sensor Networks

Research in wireless sensor networks (WSN) has gained a lot of attention in recent years. One of the most challenging topics within this area is power consumption. Wireless sensor nodes only have very limited energy available. They are typically powered by small sized batteries, or even by energy harvesting devices and have a required lifetime of several years. Typical applications for WSNs are smart buildings, environment monitoring, or automotive intra-vehicle applications such as tire pressure monitoring (TPMS). Power can be saved by switching the sensor nodes off when no data transmission or other activity is ongoing. This is no problem for sensor nodes which are only transmitting data and do not act as receivers. In this way, star topology networks can be built with a base station which is always on and listening into the channel if there is any incoming transmission from a remote sensor node. Such topologies can be used for example in vehicles where the base station can be powered by the car battery. The duty cycle d of the transmitting sensor nodes can be expressed as the active time tact divided by the total time ttot d= tact tact = ttot tact + tslp (1)

In [6] three types of rendez-vous schemes are presented: Purely synchronous. All nodes are synchronized in time and specic time slots are agreed for communication. The drawbacks of this scheme are that it is hard to accomplish in a fully ad-hoc network and that it causes a high communication overhead which may result in an increased power consumption. Purely asynchronous. In this rendez-vous scheme, each sensor node is equipped with a dedicated wakeup receiver. This wake-up receiver is designed for extremely low power consumption such that it can be always on and monitor the communication channel. The wake-up receiver cannot be used for the main communication however. It supports only very low data rates and reported designs suffer from a rather low sensitivity compared to communication receivers. The sensitivity of wake-up receivers typically lies in a range from -50 dBm [10, 7] to -72 dBm [8] at a power consumption between 50 W [8] and 65 W [9]. The sensitivity can be increased by sending a longer preamble and thus achieve a certain coding gain, but these measures increase the power required by the transmitter to send the longer preamble. Another way of increasing the range of the wake-up signal is to increase the output power of the transmitter for a short wake-up pulse. Whether such an approach is feasible depends on the application and where more power is available, at the receiver or at the transmitter. Pseudo-asynchronous. Sensor nodes establish communication links on demand. [6] presents two different approaches, one where the communication is triggered by the transmitter, and another one, where the communication is triggered by the receiver. This rendez-vous scheme is based on duty-cycled trans-

In this way, the power consumption can be reduced to any desired value just by making the sleep time tslp long enough in relation to the active time tact . The standbycurrent in sleep mode is the lower limit and whether the required tslp is tolerable or not depends on the application of interest. By introducing a duty cycle in the transmitting nodes, it is only possible to build star-topology networks however. In order to build ad-hoc multi-hop networks it is necessary to reduce the power consumption of receiving sensor nodes as well, such that they can monitor the communication channel without draining the battery.

mitters as well as receivers. It is shown in [6] that this rendez-vous scheme can outperform the purely asynchronous approach. The scheme presented in this work is a combination of the purely asynchronous and the pseudo-asynchronous approach. Like in the pseudo-asynchronous scheme, the receiver is operated in a duty-cycled mode of operation. Unlike the protocols in [6] however, where the receiver and transmitter negotiate a time for transmission the presented architecture does not rely on bidirectional communication for forwarding or receiving a data packet. Instead the main receiver is heavily duty-cycled with very short sleep times such that it acts as a wake-up receiver. This is possible because the transceiver presented in section 2 uses bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonators to generate the carrier in transmit mode and the local oscillator (LO) in receive mode. Compared to conventional quartz based oscillators, the start-up time of a BAW based oscillator is much shorter.

the transmitter has to send is exactly one period of the receivers duty cycle ttot . tpre = tslp + tact = ttot (6)

power [W]

d = 1/4 deff = 1/4 receive

sleep time [s]

power [W] receive

sleep

sleep

1.1 Calculating the Duty Cycle

In order to reduce the average power consumption, a duty cycle d has to be introduced. The active time tact consists of the start-up time tstart of the receiver and the actual reception time trx . The total time ttot of one cycle consits of tstart , trx , and the sleep time tslp . d= tact tstart + trx = ttot tstart + trx + tslp (2)

sleep sleep time [s]

sleep

receive

receive

receive

receive

receive

d = 1/4 deff = 1/4

sleep

Figure 1: Duty cycle with different repetition rates As shown in Equation 4, the required sleep time depends on tstart and trx . While trx scales with the number of bytes to be received and the data rate, tstart is xed and in order to achieve the highest possible repetition rate, it has to be ensured, that the rst term is only a fraction of the second one. Otherwise the start-up time dominates the active time as shown in Figure 2. In this case, the duty cycle d = 1/4 as in Figure 1, but the effective duty cycle def f = 1/24. For the transmitter, this means that the preamble has to be six times longer. Of course tsleep can be shorter if Pstart < Prx .

The average power consumption Pavg can be calculated as Pavg = Pslp tslp + Pstart tstart + Prx trx tslp + tstart + trx (3)

If the average power Pavg is limited by the energy source, the duty cycle has to be chosen accordingly. Assuming that Pslp , Pstart , and Prx have been optimized as much as possible, there is only one remaining variable, which is the sleep time. The sleep time which is required for a certain Pavg can be calculated as ) Prx Pavg tslp = tstart + trx . Pavg Pslp (4) The resulting duty cycle can be expressed as Pstart Pavg Pavg Pslp d= (tstart + trx ) (Pavg Pslp ) . tstart (Pstart Pslp ) + trx (Prx Pslp ) (5) ( ) (

power [W]

d = 1/4 deff = 1/24 start-up receive

sleep time [s]

Figure 2: Duty cycle dominated by start-up

1.2 Lower Limit of the Start-Up Time

Virtually every high performance receiver requires a very precise frequency reference to generate a LO signal, which is then used to downconvert a received signal to lower frequency bands. The start-up time of this high precision oscillator limits the start-up time of a receiver. The most common frequency reference is a quartz crystal. Quartz crystals are available up to frequencies of around 40 MHz and with quality (Q) factors around 104 . As a rule of

Once the required duty cycle is known, tact has to be kept as short as possible in order to allow for a high repetition rate. Figure 1 presents two different modes of operation. Both of them have the same duty cycle of d = 1/4, but the repetition rate of the second one is much higher. In this way the power consumption of the transmitter can be reduced because the required preamble length tpre which

thumb, the start-up time of an oscillator is the product of its Q and the period of its center frequency fc . tstart = Q 1 fc (7)

the BAW devices are not only used for frequency generation. Two resonators are integrated directly into the low noise amplier (LNA) for ltering. A detailed description of the LNA together with the on-chip matching network containing also the RX/TX switch is given in [2].

For a quartz oscillator with a resonant frequency of 10 Mhz and a Q of 10000, this results in tstart 1 = 10000 = 1ms. 10M Hz (8)

2.2 Oscillator
The applied BAW resonators show a temperature drift of about -18ppm/C. In order to compensate for this drift, the temperature is measured and the frequency is adjusted by means of digitally controlled capacitors in parallel to the resonator. The allowed temperature ranges from -40C to +125C. Additionally, the oscillator in the transmit path can be tuned with a variable DC voltage. The DC voltage applied at the bottom electrode of the resonator causes a change in the stiffness of the piezoelectric material, resulting in a frequency shift. The effect is very linear with voltage, but as its amplitude is only 40 kHz/V, it is only used in the transmit path for modulation. The Q of a BAW resonator is around 1000. Like for the quartz based oscillator in equation 8, the start up time of the BAW based oscillator can be estimated as tstart = 1000 1 < 0.5s. 2.1GHz (9)

2 BAW based Transceiver

By using a resonator with a higher resonant frequency, the start-up time of the receiver can be reduced signicantly. Figure 3 shows the schematic of a transceiver which uses BAW resonators to generate the carrier in transmit mode and the LO in receive mode [3]. The BAW based oscillators directly oscillate at the carrier frequency of 2.1 GHz. In contrast to this, typical quartz based systems use a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) which derives its frequency accuracy from the quartz in a phase locked loop (PLL).
Analog BAW BAW PPF LNA Q Temp. Sensor ANT LO I PPF IF Filter

ADC RSSI

2.3 Receiver Topology

The receive path of the transceiver is based on an image reject architecture. The applied BAW-based LO does not provide quadrature phases because this would require a higher current consumption. That is why the LNA is followed by a polyphase lter in order to generate the quadrature phases required for the image reject architecture in the signal path. An image reject architecture is a good choice if a low intermediate frequency (IF) is desired. In a normal heterodyne architecture the choice of an appropriate IF bears a trade-off between image rejection and the rejection of interfering signals which are located close to the desired channel [5]. With a lower IF it is easier to separate the desired signal from neighboring interferers after downconversion. On the other hand a very low IF means that the image frequency is very close to the desired signal at RF and cannot be ltered sufciently before the downconversion. The LNA in the presented transceiver includes BAW resonators which can be used as image reject lters for a low IF of 10.7 MHz in addition to the image reject architecture. The receiver architecture is described in detail in [1]. The IF signal is fed into a limiting amplier, which outputs a time-continuous binary signal. The binary signal is then sampled and further processing is done in the digital domain. Besides this binary signal, the limiting amplier outputs a received signal strength indicator (RSSI). This RSSI value is available as an analog voltage which can also be converted to a digital value by an internal 10 bit ADC. The sensitivity of the presented transceiver

Matching Network

BAW

Filter Filter

Frequency Divider clock

Mux

FSK Demod. Matched Filter

NCO

PA BAW

Data FIFO Data/Clk Recovery Digital Baseband TX Asyn. SPI Interface Digital

DAC

Figure 3: Block Diagram of the BAW based Transceiver

2.1 BAW device

The applied BAW resonators are so called mirror-type BAWs or surface mounted resonators (SMR). They consist of a piezoelectric layer between two electrodes. When the piezoelectric layer is excited, an acoustic wave is launched into the bulk, in contrast to a surface acoustic wave (SAW) resonator, where the wave propagates along the surface. In order to prevent the waves from propagating further into the substrate, there is an acoustic mirror underneath the resonator which reects the waves. There exist other BAW technologies, based on a cavity underneath the resonator instead of the acoustic mirror but in terms of robustness the mirror-type BAWs are superior to these so called membrane-type BAWs [11]. In the presented transceiver,

is -90 dBm at a data rate of 50 kBit/s and a BER of 102 . The current consumption in receive mode is 8 mA with a 3.3 V supply.

3 Required Extension to the Presented Transceiver

With the presented architecture, it is possible to use the main receiver as wake-up receiver by applying a dutycycled mode of operation with a high repetition rate. Not yet implemented in the presented architecture is a low power real time clock with the purpose of triggering the duty cycle. The power consumption of such an oscillator can be estimated to be low enough such that the power consumption in sleep mode remains below 3 W. This value includes the real time clock, biasing cells, voltage regulators and leakage currents. The wake-up criterion should be evaluated in two stages. 1. The RSSI value can be evaluated very quickly. If it is above a certain threshold, a carrier is present. If this is not the case, then the receiver can go back into sleep mode immediately. The sensitivity of this rst stage can be congured by choosing the threshold accordingly. 2. If a carrier has been detected, the receiver remains active and polls for a run-in sequence. The sensitivity of this second stage depends on the data-rate of the transmitted signal, and is a trade-off with power consumption. With a lower datarate, the sensitivity of the receiver increases, but on the other hand, a lower datarate means that both the receiver and the transmitter have to be active for a longer period, which increases the power consumption (or decreases the repetition rate).

Receiver Pstart 3 [mW] tstart 0.5 [s] (BAW), 1 [ms] (Quartz) Prx 24 [mW] trx 30 [s] Pslp 3 [W] Transmitter Ptx 18 [mW] Pslp 3 [W] Table 1: Parameters Figure 4 shows the systems power consumption assuming one wake-up event per second, plotted versus the repetition rate of the receiver. With a higher repetition rate, the power consumption of the transmitter decreases while the power consumption of the receiver increases. The power consumption of the receiver increases because for a given active time as dened by tstart and trx in Table 4, only tslp can be scaled to achieve a certain repetition rate. Thus the duty cycle of the receiver is changed, and a higher repetition rate means a higher power consumption. For the transmitter, the higher repetition rate means that the preamble can be shorter and the power consumption decreases. When the two power consumptions are added in order to evaluate the systems power consumption, an optimum can be found.

2000 1800 System Power Consumption [W] 1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 BAW based System Quartz based System

100

200 300 400 Repetition Rate [Repetitions / Second]

500

4 Optimization of Overall Power Consumption

In order to compare the BAW based approach to a conventional quartz based system, the power consumption of the system, including the receiver and the transmitter is evaluated. Table 4 contains values for the given parameters. The values concerning the power consumption of the BAW based system are taken from [3]. In order to allow for a fair comparison, a quartz based receiver is assumed which has the same values for Pstart , Prx , trx and Pslp . Only tstart is different, and set to 1 ms as calculated in equation 8.

Figure 4: System power consumption vs repetition rate

For very low repetition rates, the overall power consumption is dominated by the transmitter, while the receiver dominates the power consumption for higher repetition rates. The optimum of the overall power consumption can be found where the two power consumptions are equal. One can observe, that for the quartz based system, the power consumption increases much faster with a higher repetition rate than the power consumption of the BAW based system. This effect is caused by tstart which becomes the dominating factor compared to trx and tslp .

5 Measurement and Chip Photo

Figure 5 shows the measured start-up time of the oscillator. From the moment when the enable signal goes to high, it takes about 1.5 s until the system is stable. This measurement has been performed with the oscillator in the transmit path because it can easily be measured at the antenna-pin. The start-up time is a little bit higher than expected from Equation 9, but still a very good value.
4 oscillator enable [V] 3 2 1 0

Figure 7: Chip Photo

0.8 transmitter output [V] 0.4

6 Conclusion
It has been shown that it is possible to use communication receivers as wake-up receivers. By using appropriate duty cycles the power consumption can be reduced such that it can be compared to dedicated wake-up receivers. The presented approach offers two important advantages: The only additional circuitry which is required is a low power real time clock. The sensitivity of the receiver is not impaired, when it is used as a duty cycled wake-up receiver. So the presented approach is capable of outperforming dedicated wake-up receivers which suffer from a very low sensitivity. Furthermore it has been shown that the start-up time of the LO has a major impact on the achievable repetition rate of the duty cycle. A high repetition rate is required to allow for a short preamble in the transmitted signal. In this way the power consumption of the transmitter and the whole communication system can be optimzed. That is why the presented BAW based system with its short start-up time is superior to conventional quartz based transceivers. This work has been partly funded by the EC FP7 project CHOSeN and Austrian FIT-IT project SNOPS.

-0.4

-0.8
0.00

1.00

2.00

3.00

4.00

5.00

6.00

time [ s] start-up = 1.5 s

Figure 5: Start-Up Measurement Figure 6 shows the measured 10 bit RSSI value versus the input power.
1200

1000

800 RSSI

600

400

200

-120

-100

-80

-60 Input Power [dBm]

-40

-20

0 0

Figure 6: 10 bit RSSI value vs input power Figure 7 shows a photo of the transceiver ASIC together with three BAW dies. Each of the BAW dies contains eight resonators. The used resonators are connected to the transceiver via wire-bonds. From two of the BAW dies only one resonator is connected to the transceiver. These resonators are used in the oscillators which generate the carrier signal in the transmit path and the LO signal in the receive path. From the third BAW die two resonators are connected to the LNA where they are used for ltering. The size of the transceiver ASIC is 2 mm by 1.5 mm.

References
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