Design and implementation of a low-power OFDM receiver for wireless communications

Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems can efficiently combat the issue of frequency-selective fading channels. Therefore, OFDM has become one of the most popular baseband modulation techniques for wireless communications. This paper presents the design and implementation of a low-power OFDM baseband receiver for wireless local area networks (WLAN). The proposed architecture employs low-power register files and resource-sharing techniques, thus consuming less power than many existing works. The proposed design adopts a number of area-efficient hardware structures to further reduce the hardware cost. Finally, because it is designed using 0.18 μm CMOS technology, the core of the proposed chip has approximately 239K gates, and its power consumption is approximately 36 mW at 20 MHz.