C29. A 0.22 nj/b 2.4 GHz Super-Regenerative QPSK Receiver

In this paper, a complete super-regenerative QPSK receiver is designed to operate at 2.4 GHz. The receiver front-end is comprised of an LNA and a super-regenerative oscillator (SRO), both merged for current reuse and lower power consumption. The front-end is followed by a simple signal conditioning circuit that uses SRO oscillations to generate four phase digital clocks to clock a novel, yet simple digital phase detection engine that is capable of demodulating phase modulation preserved in SRO oscillations into original sent data. The whole receiver was designed using a 0.13 um technology, where transient noise simulation results show a power consumption of only 0.87 mW, while being able to properly detect and demodulate a -90 dBm, 4 Mbps QPSK modulated signal equivalent to 0.22 nj/b.