The Design of Ultralow-Power MEMS-Based Radio for WSN and WBAN

Transceivers for wireless sensor networks (WSN) and wireless body area networks (WBAN) require both extreme miniaturization and ultra-low-power dissipation in order to be seamlessly integrated virtually everywhere and enable ubiquitous connectivity among persons, objects, machines and the environment. The miniaturization challenge can be addressed with a combination of system-on-chip (SoC) and system-in-package (SiP) approaches to build an ultra-compact transceiver. The confined space is also limiting the available energy, which raises several design and system issues that could severely affect the radio robustness to interferers, the link budget and the autonomy. This paper presents how innovative narrowband radio architectures devised to take advantage and circumvent the limitations of a few well-chosen MEMS devices can address the above issues and go beyond the existing solutions both in terms of miniaturization and power dissipation reduction.