An Ultra-Low-Power 4.7mA-Rx 22.4mA-Tx Transceiver Circuit in 65-nm CMOS for M2M Satellite Communications

As of today, the machine-to-machine and Internet of Things (IoT) markets have significantly benefited from the deployment of diverse and efficient terrestrial low-power wide area networks (LPWAN) thanks to technologies such as SIGFOX UNB, LoRa, or NB-IoT. To further increase the coverage of such networks to remote areas, a satellite-based network with close interconnection to a terrestrial one is required. In this brief, we show the feasibility of a satellite link based on system and technological concepts similar to those used for LPWAN. We additionally prove the possibility of integrating the terminal transceiver in a single CMOS IC with power consumption and cost of the same order of magnitude as the terrestrial one. To this end, a complete L-band transceiver has been implemented. The transmitter modulates 400 symbols/s QPSK signals at as high as +12 dBm output power for 22.4 mA consumption under 3.3 V. The receiver consumes 4.7 mA while detecting the presence of low Earth orbit satellite pilots and demodulating the 20 ksymbols/s QPSK signal with −112 dBm sensitivity. The baseband processing handles up to 40 kHz Doppler shift and +/ − 440 Hz/s Doppler drift. The IC is processed in 65-nm CMOS technology from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited.