Loose synchronization method for low-power superregenerative wake-up receiver

The use of wake-up receivers (WURs) in wireless body area networks (WBAN) has remarkable potential to improve energy efficiency. During the recent years, multiple WUR designs and architectures have been therefore proposed for WBANs and wireless sensor networks (WSN). Superregenerative oscillator (SRO) based architecture is inherently sensitive, which makes it an attractive choice for a WUR. It is known that to improve the selectivity and to reduce the energy consumption the quench frequency should be the same or in the order of data rate. Therefore, synchronization is required. To achieve this with low-power consumption, pulse width modulation is used to encode transferred address information. The decoder measures the pulse widths and uses uncertainty interval that enables loose synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver. The decoder is implemented and its power consumption is measured. Decoder operation is verified with simulations using the hardware description language simulator.