A Low-Power All-Digital on-Chip CMOS Oscillator for a Wireless Sensor Node

• Main Authors: Duo Sheng, Min-Rong Hong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2016-10-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: on-chip reference clock generator; wireless sensor node; wireless body area network (WBAN); all digital; low power
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/16/10/1710

This paper presents an all-digital low-power oscillator for reference clocks in wireless body area network (WBAN) applications. The proposed on-chip complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) oscillator provides low-frequency clock signals with low power consumption, high delay resolution, and low circuit complexity. The cascade-stage structure of the proposed design simultaneously achieves high resolution and a wide frequency range. The proposed hysteresis delay cell further reduces the power consumption and hardware costs by 92.4% and 70.4%, respectively, relative to conventional designs. The proposed design is implemented in a standard performance 0.18 μm CMOS process. The measured operational frequency ranged from 7 to 155 MHz, and the power consumption was improved to 79.6 μW (@7 MHz) with a 4.6 ps resolution. The proposed design can be implemented in an all-digital manner, which is highly desirable for system-level integration.