Low power asynchronous packet-based baseband transceiver for wireless sensor networks

Random-access packet-based communication schemes are suitable for wireless sensor networks since medium access in their applications is often uncoordinated while sensor nodes communicate bursty flows of data. Preamble detection is an important task in packet-based communication protocols. The implementation of a previously proposed preamble detection scheme for low-power, wide-band, asynchronous packet communications which includes built-in characterization features is presented here. The baseband transmitter design was fabricated on IBM´s 130-nm digital CMOS process and the baseband receiver design was prototyped on a Xilinx FPGA. Silicon prototypes of the fabricated design were successfully tested. The performance of the preamble detector measured at hardware speed is reported.