Low power dissipation real time counter for sensor network application

In sensor network application,to calculate the sleeping time of the sensor nodes,the real time counter is an important part.When the sensor node is in the sleep mode,most of power dissipation is consumed by the real time counter.How to reduce the power dissipation of the real time counter becomes an important research topic to extend the battery life in senor network application.This paper presents a low power dissipation 16-bit real time counter for sensor network application.Charge recovery logic technology is adopted in the real time counter to achieve low power dissipation.To demonstrate the performance of the proposed real time counter,a test chip is designed and fabricated by 0.18μm CMOS technology.Experimental results indicate that the proposed real time counter with a charge recovery logic dissipates only 27 nW when working at the frequency of 100 kHz,while the conventional structure of the real time counter dissipates 140 nW in total.