A Two-Way Link Transceiver Design

In this chapter the two-way link scenario is covered. In the first part of this chapter, the general guidelines for a two-way link transmitter design are given and a set of specification is derived. Starting from the fact that the frequency synthesizer is the real bottleneck in the design of an ultra-low power frequency-hopping radio for WSNs, the synthesizer specifications are derived. A new fast frequency-hopping synthesizer is proposed that achieves the targeted specifications with a power consumption smaller than 0.5 mW. The synthesizer building blocks are described focusing on the trade-offs required by the silicon implementation of the proposed architecture. In the second part of the chapter, the receiver design is discussed. A link budget analysis is performed and general guidelines in the design of the receiver are given. The chapter ends with the simulation and experimental. These results show that it is possible to implement a fast frequency-hopping scheme not only in complex and less power constrained radios (like Bluetooth radios), but also in severely power constrained radios meant for WSNs.