A 40-nm low-power WiFi SoC with clock gating and power management strategy

ABSTRACT

With the emerging of Internet of Things (IoT) industry, applications like smart power plugs, security ID tags, home automation and wearable electronic devices all make the demand for low-power WiFi chips impendency. In this paper, a low-power 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n WiFi system-on-chip (SoC) is designed and implemented with 40-nm CMOS process, with area of 8.1 mm². The low-power SoC integrates 32-bit microcontroller, 802.11b/g/n WiFi baseband, 2.4 GHz RF transceiver, ample memory space, ADC, 6-channel PWM, flexible I/O interfaces, multi-stage power management module, etc. It has several sleep modes with extremely low leakage current as 0.8 mA/12 µA in light/deep sleep mode and 0.4 µA in shutdown mode to reduce the power consumption. High performance is demonstrated, including Pout (−28 dB/-30 dB EVM) of 20.1 dBm/19.1 dBm and RX sensitivity of −76 dBm/-74 dBm meanwhile the total current of 148.5 mA/146.5 mA (TX) for 54 Mbps OFDM/HT20 MCS7.

KEYWORDS:

• Clock gating
• IoT
• low-power
• SoC
• WiFi

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [61774078]