SAN FRANCISCO — Researchers at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have built a prototype radio that adheres to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for wireless personal-area networks (WPANs), making it the first radio to meet the standard, the group said.
Researchers from the institute's Micros research center in Daejjeon, South Korea, detailed several low-power radio designs at the International Solid-State Circuits Conferences here on Monday (Feb. 10) at a session on wireless PAN transceivers.
The IEEE developed the 802.15.4 WPAN standard as a low-cost alternative to Bluetooth transceivers, which are defined by the IEEE 802.15.1 standard. Bluetooth devices are considered too expensive and consume too much power for low date-rate applications in the home automation and industrial control markets, critics say.
The Korean researchers said their 2.4-GHz coin-sized radio (which measures 8.75 mm2) costs less than a dollar. The device is essentially a system-in-chip with monolithic structures layered on a multilevel printed-circuit board using chip-on-board connection techniques. Housed in a plastic package, the device contains a flip-chip RF transceiver and flip-chip processor, a pc-board inductor, a full transceiver, an inverted-F patch antenna and a battery.
The processor circuitry includes a modem, processor, controller and memory. The transceiver circuits utilize a low-IF architecture with a polyphase filter and a transistor linearization technique.
Both flip-chips are fabbed in 0.18-micron CMOS . The device consumes 21 mW in receive mode and 30 mW in transmit mode using a 1.8-volt supply voltage.
