Feedback Driven Adaptive Power Management for Minimum Power Operation of Wireless Receivers

Modern wireless transceiver systems are designed to operate under worst case channel operating conditions (interference, adjacent channel power, multi-path effects). This results in very tight performance specifications for the front-end RF circuit components. In this paper, we develop an adaptive power management strategy for RF systems that delivers just enough power (and performance) to the RF front end to maintain operation at or below a specified maximum bit error rate (BER) across temporally changing operating conditions using a feedback-driven supply voltage control algorithm. As the communication channel degrades, more power is consumed by the RF front end and vice versa. Since the maximum bit-error rate specification is never violated, minimum voice or video quality through the wireless channel is always guaranteed. It is further shown that if the front-end circuitry is adaptively compensated (using a novel biasing circuit) for different supply voltage values, further power savings can be achieved.