A Low-Power, High-Sensitivity, OOK-Super-Regenerative Receiver for WBANs

A low power, high sensitivity, super-regenerative (SR) receiver for wireless body area networks (WBANs) is proposed in this brief. To enable high sensitivity while maintaining low power consumption, a two-step periodically quenching controller with automatic negative transconductance (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${-G}_{{m}} $ </tex-math></inline-formula>) controller is designed for tuning the biasing current of the super-regenerative oscillator (SRO) at twice the data rate of the input signal. To reduce the power consumption without compromising the loop gain, a novel cross-coupled SRO architecture using gm-boosting, adaptive bulk biasing, and dynamic threshold control techniques is presented. The proposed super-regenerative receiver with a center frequency of 2.4-GHz is implemented in 180-nm CMOS technology. Simulation results show that this receiver achieves a BER of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${2}{\times }{10}^{{-3} }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> at SNR = 12 dB and sensitivity of −87 dBm at 3.3 Mb/s while consuming 398 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mu }\text{W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>.