A PVT-Robust Super-Regenerative Receiver with Background Frequency Calibration and Concurrent Quenching Waveform

Abstract

A process-voltage-temperature (PVT)-robust, low power, low noise, and high sensitivity, super-regenerative (SR) receiver is proposed in this paper. To enable high sensitivity and robust-PVT operation, a fast locking phase-locked-loop (PLL) with initial random phase error reduction is proposed to continuously adjust the center frequency deviations of the SR oscillator (SRO) without interrupting the input data stream. Additionally, a concurrent quenching waveform (CQW) technique is devised to improve the SRO sensitivity and its noise performance. The proposed SRO architecture is controlled by two separate biasing branches to extend the sensitivity accumulation (SA) phase and reduce its noise during the SR phase, compared to the conventional optimal quenching waveform (OQW). The proposed SR receiver is implemented at 2.46 GHz center frequency in 180 nm SMIC CMOS technology and achieves better sensitivity, power consumption, noise performance, and PVT immunity compared with existent SR receiver architectures.

Keywords

• concurrent quenching waveform (cqw)
• phase-locked loop (pll)
• super regenerative oscillator (sro)
• sensitivity