Batteryless RF transceiver for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a fast growing research area which has attracted considerable attentions both in industrial and academic environments in the last few years. In this work a complete RF transceiver for WSN applications is presented, which includes a RF energy harvesting system, a power management unit and a RF front end. The transceiver is able to operate by scavenging the required DC power from the incoming RF signal, thus avoiding the use of a battery. The use of a quartz oscillator has been avoided as well by exploiting the input signal as a frequency reference. This results in a highly integrated and low-cost transceiver solution. The circuit was designed in a 90-nm CMOS technology by TSMC. The device operates with a minimum input power of 15 dBm and supports a 915 MHz FSK downlink and a 2.45 GHz OOK uplink, which attain a data rate up to 5 and 10 Mbps, respectively.