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A PLL based WSN transmitter and I/Q LO signal generator at 430–435 MHz

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Abstract

A fully integrated Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) based transmitter and I/Q Local Oscillating (LO) signal generator used for half-duplex Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) transceivers is proposed. Instead of one 430–435 MHz PLL for frequency synthesizing, a 1.72–1.74 GHz PLL is designed together with a 1/4 frequency divider. Then the chip area of the inductors in the Voltage-Controlled Oscillator (VCO) is decreased to about 1/16, and I/Q dual-path LO signals can be obtained without additional power consumption. A Gray-code controlled prescaler is proposed to avoid the glitches and uncertain states, and then the frequency dividing accuracy is improved by 17%. A Gauss Frequency Shift Keying (GFSK) transmitter with a pipeline modulator is proposed, the 1st and 2nd Adjacent Channel Power Ratio (ACPR) are −19.9 and −20.7 dBc, respectively. A mathematical spur model of 1/4 frequency dividers is built here, and then a low-spur 1/4 frequency divider composed of our proposed improved Current Mode Logic (CML) latches is designed. The testing results show that the reference spurs are −61.2 dBc@20 MHz and −57.7 dBc@40 MHz at the output of the PLL, and −70.5 dBc@20 MHz and −66.6 dBc@40 MHz at the output of our 1/4 divider. With 2.6-mW power consumption, our proposed 1/4 frequency divider has a phase-noise contribution of only 0.5 dBc/Hz@500 kHz and 0.2 dBc/Hz@1 MHz.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Engineering, TNLIST, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Bo Zhao, Lei Guo, Huazhong Yang & Hui Wang

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  1. Bo Zhao
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  2. Lei Guo
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  3. Huazhong Yang
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  4. Hui Wang
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Correspondence to Huazhong Yang.

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Zhao, B., Guo, L., Yang, H. et al. A PLL based WSN transmitter and I/Q LO signal generator at 430–435 MHz. Analog Integr Circ Sig Process 67, 293–308 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10470-011-9611-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10470-011-9611-z

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