A noise cancelling envelope detector for low power wireless sensor applications

In this paper, a noise cancelling technique is proposed for envelope detectors. The noise cancelling technique reduces the noise introduced by the devices of the envelope detector to achieve higher signal-to-noise ratio without the need to increase the power consumption. To our knowledge, this is the first envelope detector with noise cancelling technique. Theory as well as simulation results are demonstrated in this paper. The proposed envelope detector is simulated using 65 nm CMOS technology node. Simulation results shows that the sensitivity of -60 dBm is obtained at an RF frequency of 2.4 GHz for a data rate of 2 Mbps while consuming 22 μW from 1 V supply.