Software Reconfigurable Frequency Readouts with Coarse Voltage Quantizers for Sensor Applications

Reconfigurable-resolution sensor nodes with no hardware change is an exciting prospect for IoT applications. Such sensor networks can be realized using hardware-software approach where the sensor node has minimal hardware and the reconfigurability is restricted to the gateway or the edge device with only a software change. In this work, we present a 300 mV supply voltage, FFT based software reconfigurable frequency readout for oscillator based reactance sensors. Measurement results show that the readout technique provides excellent SNR reconfigurability from 58 dB up to 120 dB using a 1-bit hardware.