UC San Diego

The growing popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) emerges new applications and concepts in order to narrow down the margin between theory and reality for implementation of smart houses and cities. During past few years, a massive number of academic research and industrial products were introduced for short range IoT, using typical low power standards such as Bluetooth-Low-Energy (BLE). To implement the same concept in a wider range, a recent standard called NarrowBand-IoT (NB-IoT) was introduced with the goal of using the available cellular infra-structure such as GSM and LTE for a long range yet low data rate and low power communication.

This dissertation proposes a sub-mW Receiver front-end design that meets the standard requirements of NB-IoT. To this end. Chapter 1 derives the radio specifications of NB-IoT and reviews the available architectures in the literature.

Starting from the first block of the RF front-end, a 36 uW low-power LNA with sub-3dB minimum noise figure (NF) is introduced in Chapter 2 with a state-of-the-art FoM. The most power hungry block of the RF front-end, that is the voltage-controlled-oscillator (VCO), is the main focus of Chapter 3, where a 0.55 mW phase-locked-loop (PLL) was designed and proposed for NB-IoT, achieving better than -66 dBc spur reduction. These two blocks along with other necessary blocks of the receiver front-end are designed and implemented in a Zero-IF RX structured explained in Chapter 4, resulting in a sub-mW NB-IoT RX front-end.

To further investigate the efficiency of short-range low data rate communications, Chapter 5 introduces a transceiver (TRX) with 2.7 pJ/b energy efficiency for the receiver side was introduced and implemented, using low path loss offered by magnetic human body communication (mHBC) scheme.