MSc thesis project proposal

Reducing Supply Sensitivity of Bluetooth Transceivers

Portable internet-of-things (IoT) devices powered by batteries or energy harvesters generally need buck and/or boost switching dc-dc converters to transform the output levels of energy sources to the nominal supply voltage of IoT electronic circuitry. Due to the switching operation of dc-dc converters, the resulting output ripples can severely degrade the performance of the supply sensitive circuitry when connected directly.1 To avoid this, a low dropout (LDO) linear regulator is typically inserted after the switching converter to stabilize the supply voltage. However, the extra voltage overhead (∼200 mV) will worsen the system’s power efficiency (∼80% under 1-V supply). This will make it even more critical with the supply scaling down with technology. In this project, we aim to develop a method to suppress supply sensitivity of a Bluetooth transceiver such that it may directly operate from a switched-mode dc-dc converter generating fairly large ripples.

Contact

dr. Masoud Babaie

Electronic Circuits and Architectures Group

Department of Microelectronics

Last modified: 2022-03-11