Modeling, design and implementation of a low-power FPGA based asynchronous wake-up receiver for wireless applications

Power consumption is a major concern for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) nodes, and it is often dominated by the power consumption of communication means. For such networks, devices are most of the time battery-powered and need to have very low power consumption. Moreover, for WSNs, limited amount of data are periodically sent and then the radio should be in idle or deep sleep mode most of the time. Thus using event-triggered radios is well suited and could lead to significant reduction of the overall power consumption of WSNs. Therefore this paper explores the design of an asynchronous module that can wake up the main receiver when another node is trying to send data. Furthermore, we implement the proposed solution in an FPGA to decrease the fabrication cost for low volume applications and make it easier to design, re-use and enhance. To decrease the static power consumption, we explore the possibility of reducing the supply voltage. The observed overall power consumption is under 5 μW at 250 kbps. Moreover, using a new asynchronous design technique, we observed that power consumption can be further reduced.