Designing wireless transceiver blocks for LoRa application

The Internet of Things enables connected objects to communicate over distant fields, and trade-offs are often observed with the battery life and range. Long Range Radio, or LoRa, provides transmission for up to 15 km with impressive battery life, while sacrificing throughput. In order to design the LoRa system, there is a need to design and implement the LoRa transceiver. 1 V, 900 MHz, LoRa-capable transceiver blocks were designed in 65 nm process. The receiver front end consists of the narrowband low noise amplifier, common gate-common source balun, and double balanced mixer. The power consumption of this system is 2.63 mW. The overall gain of the receiver front end is approximately 51 dB. The transmitter implemented in this project utilizes a class-D amplifier alongside an inverter chain driver stage and a transformer based power combiner. The transmitter outputs 21.57 dBm of power from the given supply at 900 MHz, operating at 21% drain efficiency.