Power Scalable Radio Receiver Design Based on Signal and Interference Condition

A low power adaptive digital baseband architecture is presented for a low-IF receiver of IEEE 802.15.4-2006. The digital section’s sampling frequency and bit width are used as knobs to reduce the power under favorable signal and interference scenarios, thus recovering the design margins introduced to handle the worst case conditions. We show that in a 0.13 μm CMOS technology, for an adaptive digital baseband section of the receiver, power saving can be up to 85% (0.49 mW against 3.3 mW) in favorable interference and signal conditions. The proposed concepts in the design are tested using a receiver test setup where the design is hosted on a FPGA.