Plenary Talks
Ultra Low Power and Miniaturized MEMS-based Radio for BAN and WSN Applications
Dr. David Ruffieux
CSEM SA
Wireless transceivers for body area networks (BAN) and wireless sensor networks (WSN) require both extreme miniaturization and ultra low-power dissipation so as 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 and system-in-package approaches to build an ultra-compact transceiver module embedding the few unavoidable critical components. The limited energy available with tiny button cell batteries or energy harvesting sources results in both limited peak and average currents. It raises several design and system issues that could affect severely the radio robustness to interferers, link budget or autonomy. For sporadic data transfer, duty cycling of the radio can be used efficiently to extent the battery lifetime provided an accurate low power real time clock and energy efficient yet low latency synchronization protocols are available. For voice or low resolution video data streaming, maintaining adaptively a given link margin by transmitting intermittently bursts of data at the highest possible peak rate can result in large power savings, again due to reduced duty cycling. The corresponding requirements on the radio are a very short turn-on time and a baseband with a scalable data rate.
This paper explores how innovative narrowband radio architectures devised to take advantage and circumvent the limitations of a few well-chosen MEMS devices can address the above concepts and challenges and go beyond existing solutions both in terms of miniaturization and power dissipation reduction.