CMOS Wireless Hybrid Transceiver Powered by Integrated Photodiodes for Ultra-Low-Power IoT Applications

In this article, a communication platform for a self-powered integrated light energy harvester based on a wireless hybrid transceiver is proposed. It consists of an optical receiver and a reconfigurable radio frequency (RF) transmitter. The hybrid optical/RF communication approach improves load balancing, energy efficiency, security, and interference reduction. A light beam for communication in the downlink, coupled with a 1 MHz radio frequency signal for the uplink, offers a small area and ultra-low-power consumption design for Smart Dust/IoT applications. The optical receiver employs a new charge-pump-based technique for the automatic acquisition of a reference voltage, enabling compensation for comparator offset errors and variations in DC-level illumination. On the uplink side, the reconfigurable transmitter supports OOK/FSK/BPSK data modulation. Electronic components and the energy harvester, including integrated photodiodes, have been designed, fabricated, and experimentally tested in a 0.18 µm triple-well CMOS technology in a 1.5 × 1.3 mm2 chip area. Experiments show the correct system behavior for general and pseudo-random stream input data, with a minimum pulse width of 50 µs and a data transmission rate of 20 kb/s for the optical receiver and 1 MHz carrier frequency. The maximum measured power of the signal received from the transmitter is approximately −18.65 dBm when using a light-harvested power supply.