A High-Sensitivity Wake-up Receiver Using Tunnel Diode for ISM Band

In this paper, a new ultra-low power wake-up receiver (WUR) is presented for use in Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), designed with low-cost off-the-shelf components. It is comprised of a low-power reflection amplifier and an envelope detector. The reflection amplifier enhances the reflection gain of 38dB for impinging RF power levels as low as −98dBm. The envelope detector extracts the envelope of OOK wake-up signal and generates digital data for the microcontroller or IC using zero-bias diodes and a low-power comparator. Additionally, we conducted experiments to verify the performance of the prototype in terms of power consumption, sensitivity and bit rate. The prototype achieves the scalable bit rate from 20bps to 1kbps with the sensitivity from −98dBm to −90dBm at the frequency of 926MHz. The power consumption is only
$227\mu\mathrm{W}$
regardless of bit rate.