A low power fully CMOS integrated RF transceiver IC for wireless sensor networks

A fully CMOS integrated RF transceiver for ubiquitous sensor networks in sub-gigahertz; industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM)-band applications is implemented and measured. The integrated circuit is fabricated in 0.18-mu m CMOS technology and packaged in leadless plastic chip carrier (LPCC) package. The fully monolithic transceiver consists of a receiver, a transmitter, and an RF synthesizer with on-chip voltage-controlled oscillator. The chip fully complies with the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless personal area network in sub-gigahertz mode. The cascaded noise figure of the overall receiver is 9.5 dB and the overall transmitter achieves less than 6.3% error vector magnitude for 40 kb/s mode. The chip uses 1.8-V power supply and the power consumption is 25 mW for reception mode and 29 mW for transmission mode.