RFIC Reuse Techniques to Enable Ultra-Low-Power IoT: A Tutorial

Energy-efficient and cost-effective wireless connectivity is of paramount importance for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications and has inspired a lot of research interests lately. Reuse techniques at both the transceiver architecture and functional RF circuit levels are especially attractive as they aim to break the trade-off between power, performance and cost, while retaining compliance with the dedicated IoT communication standard. This tutorial presents a review of the widely adopted “current reuse” and “RF-I/O reuse” techniques in RFIC design and the recent design trends towards “function reuse”, “area reuse” in support for low power IoT.