RF low power subsampling architecture for wireless communication applications

With the increasing demands of wireless communication, flexible, complex, and diversified wireless communication applications are required. However, the difficulty of enabling new wireless communication applications is the lack of low power radio frequency (RF) transmission devices, especially the RF receiver. In order to alleviate this problem, an RF low power subsampling architecture for wireless communication applications is proposed in this paper. This subsampling architecture adopts a single-ended to differential configured balun low noise amplifier (balun-LNA), a subsampling mixer with high sampling ratio and a finite input response (FIR) filter and infinite impulse response (IIR) filter achieving frequency down-conversion, avoiding using high power-hungry blocks. Based on a subsampling theory, an optimum sampling frequency for the subsampling architecture is necessary to relax the complexity of the system. For the application of internet of things (IoT) wireless communication, the paper provides the implementation of the subsampling receiver solutions to get a tradeoff between power consumption, gain, noise, and sensitivity. It can achieve −85 dBm sensitivity for an amplitude shift keying (ASK) modulation at the data rate of 1 Mbps with the clock sampling frequency of 40 MHz. Finally, the theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the performance of the subsampling architecture has several advantages over others.