Ultra Low Power Small Size RF Transceiver Design for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor networks are typically used in monitoring the physical or environmental conditions such as motion, vibration, sound, and temperature etc. Typically each sensor node contains a transceiver and some other wireless communication devices. Wireless sensor node operates in the industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band. Wireless sensor nodes are mostly battery operated and in many applications they are placed un-attended. It is, therefore, required to design both hardware and software that consume very low power during the operations. Current size of the wireless sensor node is of the order of millimeter. Scientists and engineers are trying to reduce its size near to the size of dust particle. This offers a challenge to design wireless sensor nodes that must have small size and consume low power. Transceiver has a very important role in these wireless sensor nodes, while decreasing size of node, transceiver size to be decreased as well. In this thesis, we have proposed a new transceiver having small size and consuming low power as compare to already ULP915T transceiver. The proposed transceiver contains five blocks namely power amplifier (PA), low noise amplifier (LNA), crystal oscillator (XO), Phase Locked Loop (PLL), and intermediate frequency (IF). The proposed transceiver incorporates less number of LDOs (low- dropout) regulators. The size of transceiver is reduced by decreasing of beneficiary components in such a way that the takes are distributed among all components