Project overview
The increasing amount of service bands and the exponentially growing number of wireless devices, interfering with each other, challenge the sharing of the available spectrum as well as the power consumption exhibited by radio-frequency (RF) front-ends. Congestion in electromagnetic environments threatens and limits the integrity and the capacity of data exchanged between low-power wireless nodes (WNs). This is due to the compressed and saturated response exhibited by their RF receivers when exposed to co-site or jamming interference. Such performance degradation becomes more dramatic in WNs operating within the internet-of-things (IoT). In fact, these devices generally exhibit a limited dynamic range in favor of a lower power consumption and, consequently, a longer life-time. In MicronRF, we search for enabling acoustic-based CMOS-compatible nonlinear technologies that can discriminate and instinctually suppress any intolerably high interference signal. These technologies will enable radios exhibiting longer battery lifetimes, while ensuring low bit-error-rates even when operating in highly dense electromagnetic scenarios.
