A fully integrated multi-mode high-efficiency transmitter for IoT applications in 40nm CMOS

This paper presents a fully integrated multi-mode high efficiency transmitter (TX), employing supply scaling technique using a DC-DC converter to improve the efficiency for low power body area network (BAN) applications while supporting higher power Bluetooth Low Energy® (BLE) applications. The proposed architecture improves the efficiency of the conventional constant-supply switching PAs by a factor of 3 in low power mode, resulting in power saving of nearly 1mW at −10dBm output power. The TX benefits from a compact 0.1mm 2 PLL operating with an IPN of 0.83° at 2.4GHz and spot phase noise of −119.4dBc/Hz at 3MHz offset. The chip is fabricated in a 40nm LP CMOS process with a die area of 0.7mm 2 . The proposed transmitter consumes 6.1mW at 3dBm output power in BLE mode and 1.6mW at −10dBm for BAN applications, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the lowest reported power consumption among the BLE transmitters in similar process node.