Minimum Power-Consumption Estimation in ROM-Based DDFS for Frequency-Hopping Ultralow-Power Transmitters

The future of all kinds of applications that require a submilliwatt consumption strictly depends on the capability to meet design specifications at the minimum power costs. While several computer-aided-design tools are present to estimate the power consumption of modern ICs at transistor level, it is very difficult to predict the power at higher level. Given the reduced time-to-market of modern communication devices, it is very often needed to have accurate power estimations prior to the transistor-level design. Allocating a too conservative power budget to a block implies a possible poor tradeoff between the specifications of building blocks that constitute the system and their power consumption. For future power-constrained wireless devices (like wireless nodes in sensor networks), it is very important to have high-level models which can help the designer with the initial high-level choices without going into transistor-level design. One of the important blocks in modern communication devices, particularly for spread-spectrum systems, is the frequency synthesizer. In this paper, the first power-consumption model for an ultralow-power ROM-based direct digital frequency synthesizer has been developed, which can help the designer in the power optimization at a high level prior to transistor implementation.