A 1.65 mW PLL-free PSK receiver employing super-regenerative phase sampling

This paper presents a 1.65 mW low-power receiver that uses a super-regenerative oscillator (SRO) to replace power hungry phase lock loops (PLLs) that are conventionally required for phase-demodulation. It is shown that operating an SRO in the amplification mode preserves the phase of incoming RF signals, and thus an SRO is used to periodically sample the phase of two incoming training bits, after which the SRO operates as a local oscillator for a superheterodyne receiver. Operating at 0.5 V in a 0.18 Jim process, the receiver achieves -70 dBm of sensitivity at BER of 1e-3 when demodulating an 800 kbps BPSK signal without a PLL.