A −81.6dBm Sensitivity Ultrasound Transceiver in 65nm CMOS for Symmetrical Data-Links

This paper presents the design and experimental characterization of an ultrasound transceiver. The transceiver includes an on-chip transmitter and a receiver to be used in a symmetric data-link, where each sensor node has limited energy resources and is operated in air or a fluidic environment. The receiver and the transmitter operate from a 0.8V supply and consume 1.18µW and 50µW, respectively, while exchanging data at 1kbps data-rate. The receiver sensitivity is −81.6dBm at a 10°3 Bit Error Rate (BER) level, which enables an experimentally verified transmission over 3.2m in air and a predicted transmission distance in water in the order of 2km, with a measured energy per bit performance of 51.18 nJ/b.