Wake-up receiver operating at 433 MHz

Sensor nodes often have to work for a long time with a single battery. A change of the power source is sometimes not possible or involves effort and costs. If the node needs to be accessible for communication at any point of time it must have a radio in permanent receive state. This depletes the battery in a few days. The contradiction between long lifetime and permanent accessibility can be solved by using a separate wake-up receiver on the node. In this work we present a sensor node with included wake-up receiver working in the 433 MHz ISM band. Our solution consumes 2.8 mu A of current in sleep state while still maintaining a realtime behaviour. The low current consumption is achieved by modulating a 125 kHz wake-up signal on the 433 MHz carrier in the sender. In the receiving node a passive demodulation circuit extracts the wake-up signal and feeds it to an 125 kHz low frequency receiver IC. An additional 16 bit address coding is used for an selective wake-up of nodes.