A 60 GHz low power self-mixing receiver in 65-nm CMOS for a radio-triggered battery-less monolithic wireless sensor

With the growing attention at 60 GHz ISM band on millimeter-wave therapy for diseases treatment of sedative, anti-inflammatory actions or immune system stimulation, growing demand for new biomedical monitoring and treating systems with more bandwidth, high data rates and low power creates new challenges for 60 GHz body area network. Most smart wireless sensors wireless sensing operates on battery, which limits their life-time. To overcome this limitation, a system of radio-triggered batteryless monolithic wireless sensor based on mm-wave wireless power transfer technique is introduced in this work. From the system power budget analysis, it could support 10 bits communication within 10 cm, which would be sufficient for mm-wave wireless sensing application. Furthermore, it is identified that the receiver is power limited. Based on the system evaluation, an injection locked oscillator based self-mixing receiver is presented. In this architecture, the IJLO based LO scheme is used to save receiver power consumption. The sensitivity of the receiver is improved by applying the IJLO into the self-mixing architecture. This single chip receiver is implemented in a 65 nm CMOS technology. The DC power consumption of this receiver is only 16.4 mA from 1 V power supply. This power consumption is lower than other mm-wave receivers, which is an important step towards fully integrated monolithic sensor nodes.