Muting the Chatter: Maintaining sensitivity of nanowatt receivers in high interference environments

As the number of devices and nodes connected to the internet of things (IoT) continues to increase, the amount of traffic on limited spectrum continues to become more congested. Additionally, when available power fall below micro-watt levels, traditional ways of rejecting interference from the surrounding environment become impractical. This talk will cover ways that receivers, especially wakeup receivers can provide low power overhead redundancy and interference rejection, while maintaining high sensitivity and minimal power draw. This includes automatic calibration loops for gain and offset control in the RF blocks, as well as how low power digital algorithms can improve rejection after digitization. Tradeoffs between RF bandwidth, RF frequency, power, and interferer rejection will be explored and recent developments in this space will be presented.