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Saturday 11 October 2008
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IMEC shows first ultra wideband ZigBee chip
by Steve Bush
Wednesday 21 February 2007
Belgian semiconductor research organisation IMEC has revealed a 90nm CMOS transmitter for ZigBee over UWB.
“The digital transmitter is the first ever published IEEE 802.15.4a-compliant transmitter and out-performs state-of-the-art low-power narrowband transmitter implementations,” claimed IMEC.
The transmitter covers all the frequency bands of the standard between 3 and 10GHz.
“It is especially suited for application in low-power wireless sensor networks,” said IMEC. “Recently, the IEEE 802.15.4a standardisation committee proposed an alternative physical layer for ZigBee providing positioning on top of low cost, low power and scalable data range using UWB as key technology.”
The chip consists of a digitally-controlled oscillator, a programmable frequency divider, a unique digital RF modulator and an early-late detector for frequency calibration of the oscillator.
The chip runs from 1V. “Measurements on silicon show a power consumption for the transmitter of 0.65nJ per 16 chips burst (40pJ/pulse) at 3.5GHz carrier frequency, and 1.4nJ per 16 chips burst (87pJ/pulse) at 10GHz,” claimed the research organisation.
For the mandatory mode, this corresponds to 0.65mW to 1.4mW for 1Mbit/s data rate which outperforms state-of-the-art low-power narrowband transmitter implementations, said IMEC.
Power consumption is cut by switching off the entire transmitter between each burst.
RF frequency is generated by a phase-aligned frequency locked loop instead of a traditional phase locked loop. “This novel approach substantially reduces the start-up time to only 2ns and consequently reduces the signal duty cycle to only three per cent,” said IMEC. “The technique also truncates the accumulative jitter process.”
“The digital transmitter is the first ever published IEEE 802.15.4a-compliant transmitter and out-performs state-of-the-art low-power narrowband transmitter implementations,” claimed IMEC.
The transmitter covers all the frequency bands of the standard between 3 and 10GHz.
“It is especially suited for application in low-power wireless sensor networks,” said IMEC. “Recently, the IEEE 802.15.4a standardisation committee proposed an alternative physical layer for ZigBee providing positioning on top of low cost, low power and scalable data range using UWB as key technology.”
The chip consists of a digitally-controlled oscillator, a programmable frequency divider, a unique digital RF modulator and an early-late detector for frequency calibration of the oscillator.
The chip runs from 1V. “Measurements on silicon show a power consumption for the transmitter of 0.65nJ per 16 chips burst (40pJ/pulse) at 3.5GHz carrier frequency, and 1.4nJ per 16 chips burst (87pJ/pulse) at 10GHz,” claimed the research organisation.
For the mandatory mode, this corresponds to 0.65mW to 1.4mW for 1Mbit/s data rate which outperforms state-of-the-art low-power narrowband transmitter implementations, said IMEC.
Power consumption is cut by switching off the entire transmitter between each burst.
RF frequency is generated by a phase-aligned frequency locked loop instead of a traditional phase locked loop. “This novel approach substantially reduces the start-up time to only 2ns and consequently reduces the signal duty cycle to only three per cent,” said IMEC. “The technique also truncates the accumulative jitter process.”
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