Ultra-low Power Telemetry Circuits for Body Area and IoT Applications

The ultra-low power (ULP) telemetry circuits play a significant role in the wireless body area applications as well as Internet-of-Things (IoT) with stringent energy constraints. In this talk, the major telemetry technologies for typical application scenarios will first be reviewed. The system constraints and requirements will be analyzed, and those popular telemetry circuits based on both electromagnetic (EM) transmission and non-EM approaches in recent literature will be discussed. After that, the talk will focus on the ULP narrow-band telemetry circuits. The design principles of ULP short-range telemetry circuits will be illustrated by going deep into the technical details of two design examples recently published, including a 915-MHz sub-sampling phase-tracking receiver, in which the subsampling technique is proposed to reduce the power consumption of local oscillator (LO), and a 400MHz/900MHz dual-band combo transmitter which adopts the multi-phase digital power amplifier (DPA) based QAM modulation and edge combiner techniques. Both the system-level circuit innovations and the transistor-level design techniques for the purpose of ultra-low power consumption will be discussed.