23.2 A 1mm<sup>2</sup> Software-Defined Dual-Mode Bluetooth Transceiver with 10dBm Maximum TX Power and -98.2dBm Sensitivity 2.96mW RX Power at 1Mb/s
Nicola Scolari, F. Pengg, Konstantinos Manetakis, Camilo A. Salazar, Alexandre Vouilloz, Ernesto Pérez Serna, Anjana Dissanayake, P. Persechini, Vladimir Kopta, Erwan Le Roux, Francesco Chicco, Stefano Cillo, Nicola Gerber, Cédric Barbelenet, Fabio Epifano, Paulo A. Dal Fabbro, Nicolas Raemy
Abstract
The ubiquitous deployment of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) requires integrated, high performance, and low-cost wireless connectivity. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is popular due to low complexity and relaxed carrier-to-interference suppression (C/I) [1], [2]. With a typical 0dBm transmitter (TX) [1], BLE suffers from a limited link budget, susceptibility to jamming in the congested 2.4GHz band, and suboptimal bandwidth utilization. BLE supports a maximum 2Mb/s data rate over 40 channels, whereas Bluetooth Classic Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate (BT-BR/EDR) supports up to 3Mb/s in 79 channels [3] but dissipates high power due to stringent C/I and non-constant envelope modulation (NCEM) formats [4]. Hence, there is a clear need for an optimized Bluetooth Dual-Mode (BT-DM) Transceiver (TRX) that integrates the benefits of low-power and long-range of BLE (e.g., IoT) with the high performance of BT-BR/EDR (e.g., audio, legacy). This work presents a highly reconfigurable BLE, BT-BR/EDR, and IEEE 802.15.4 TRX achieving 0.125-to-3Mb/s data rate with -104.6 to –86.7dBm respective sensitivity, 2.1mW analog power, and +10dBm to -40dBm TX output power while only occupying 1mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> area. This is enabled by an innovative software-defined radio (SDR) approach, a pulling-compensated TX, numerous automated calibrations, and ultra-low-power (ULP) circuit techniques.