A 10 mW Bluetooth Low-Energy Transceiver With On-Chip Matching

A mass-produced Bluetooth Low-Energy transceiver is presented in classic double frequency VCO architecture fabricated in TSMC 55 nm CMOS. The radio part occupies 2.9 mm 2 while the complete SoC occupies 5.9 mm 2 . The transceiver consumes 11 mW when receiving at -94 dBm and 10 mW when transmitting at 0 dBm. This is roughly a factor 2 lower than benchmark mass-produced designs. The power consumption is higher than recently published experimental sliding-IF designs, but it does not suffer from their inherent susceptibility to blocking and pulling. Easy application is enabled by a fully integrated single-ended 50 Ω RFIO and combined Buck- and Boost-mode DC-DC converter.