A 0.2-V Energy-Harvesting BLE Transmitter With a Micropower Manager Achieving 25% System Efficiency at 0-dBm Output and 5.2-nW Sleep Power in 28-nm CMOS

• Published in: IEEE journal of solid-state circuits 2019-05, Vol.54 (5), p.1351-1362
• Main Authors: Yang, Shiheng, Yin, Jun, Yi, Haidong, Yu, Wei-Han, Mak, Pui-In, Martins, Rui P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bluetooth; Bluetooth low energy (BLE); CMOS; Electric potential; Energy harvesting; Frequency drift; Generators; Logic gates; master-slave sampling filter (MSSF); micropower manager (<italic xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">μ PM); Phase locked loops; Phase locked systems; phase-locked loop (PLL); power amplifier (PA); Power amplifiers; power gating; Transformers; transmitter (TX); Transmitters; ultralow-voltage (ULV); Vibration; Voltage controlled oscillators; Voltage measurement; voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO)
• ISSN: 0018-9200; 1558-173X
• DOI: 10.1109/JSSC.2018.2888874

This paper reports an ultralow-voltage (ULV) energy-harvesting bluetooth low-energy (BLE) transmitter (TX). It features: 1) a fully integrated micropower manager ( \mu PM) to customize the internal supply and bias voltages for both active and sleep modes; 2) a gate-to-source-coupling ULV voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) using a high-ratio (5.6:1) stacking transformer to improve the phase noise and output swing; 3) an ULV class-E/F 2 power amplifier (PA) with an inside-transformer LC notch to suppress the HD 3 , and finally 4) an analog type-I phase-locked loop (PLL) with a reduced duty cycle of its master-slave sampling filter (MSSF) to suppress the jitter and reference spur. The TX prototyped in 28-nm CMOS occupies an active area of 0.53 mm 2 and exhibits 25% system efficiency at 0-dBm output at a single 0.2-V supply. Without resorting from any external components, both the output HD 2 -49.6 dBm) and HD 3 -47.4 dBm) comply with the BLE standard. The FSK error is 2.84% and the frequency drift in a 425- \mu \text{s} data packet is