Nano-Power Wireless Wake-Up Receiver With Serial Peripheral Interface

We designed, implemented, tested and measured an ultra low power Wake Up Receiver (WUR), intended for use in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). Gaussian On-Off Keying (GOOK) and Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) are used to modulate and encode, respectively, the preamble signal. The receiver incorporates a decoder to enable Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). WUR was also comprehensively tested for power consumption and robustness to RF interference from wireless devices commonly found in the vicinity of persons utilising WBAN technology. Our results and comparative evaluation demonstrate that the achieved listening power of 270nW for the Wake Up Receiver is significantly lower power consumption than for the other state-of-the-art. The proposed preamble detection scheme can significantly reduce false wake ups due to other wireless devices in a WBAN. Additionally, SPI significantly reduces the overall power consumption for packet reception and decoding.