Schottky-Diode-Based Wake-Up Receiver and Power Management Systems for IoT Applications

Speaker: Mahmoud Elhebeary
Affiliation: Ph.D. Candidate

Via Zoom Only:  https://ucla.zoom.us/j/93018067494

Abstract: Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) became a crucial technology in our lives that has applications ranging from managing airports’ passenger flow to taking care of the elder through gadgets like smartwatches. It aims at connecting all appliances and products to create a vast number of applications. An IoT system is composed of leaf nodes that collect data from different applications. Leaf nodes then transmit the data to a gateway that is available at this time. Battery life is the bottleneck for leaf nodes which does not allow having the transceiver system always on. This power budget requires an always-on low power wake-up receiver (WuRx) with a battery-operated power management unit.

In this work, we target battery powered WuRx. Such a WuRx puts specific challenges including low wake-up latency, high data rate, moderate sensitivity, and low power budget to provide long battery life >10 years. Existing designs do not satisfy all challenges for the WuRx system or the battery power management efficiencies at such low power. Hence, we propose a new WuRx technique with a sub-microwatt power management unit that significantly bridges the gap between the required and achievable performance. New integrated circuit techniques are implemented in CMOS chip such as building Schottky diode on CMOS, a novel data-locking oscillator technique, and a digital correlation unit to identify transmitter signature.

When the main transceiver receives the wake-up signal, it requires a short time for settling so that it catches the gateway. Existing solutions could not provide short settling with small overshoot for a fast start-up. We propose a novel LDO that uses a new coarsely-quantized class-D control that enables wide loop bandwidth using a multi-level and pulse width modulated (MLPWM) gate control of the output device. Flipped voltage follower (FVF) output stage is adopted with a feed-forward derivative path to limit overshoot/undershoot. The proposed LDO settles within 280ns when the load is stepped in 7ns from 0 to 300mA with no observed overshoot or undershoot.

Biography:  Mahmoud Elhebeary received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the Electronics and Communications Engineering Department at Cairo University in Egypt in 2013 and 2015, respectively. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering with the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), CA, USA. He held multiple internship positions at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., San Diego, CA, USA, in 2016, 2017, and 2019 where he was involved in various analog/mixed-signal designs. His current research interests include analog, mixed-signal, power management, and RF circuit design. Mr. Elhebeary received the UCLA Graduate Division Fellowship in 2015 and the Broadcom Foundation Fellowship from 2017 to 2018. He is also a recipient of the Broadcom Foundation Fellowship from 2018 to 2019. Recently, he was awarded the “UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship Award” from 2019 to 2020, and the IEEE SSCS predoctoral achievement award (2019-2020).

For more information, contact Prof. Chih-Kong “Ken” Yang (yang@ee.ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Jun 03, 2020
11:00 am - 1:00 pm

Location:
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