Renesas announced the development of two 2.4 GHz RF transceiver technologies that support the Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) low-power, near-field communication standard. The new technologies also achieve a smaller mounting area and better power efficiency.

In addition to being compact, low cost, and power efficient, IoT devices must provide flexible support for Bluetooth LE regardless of their implementation format. Renesas has developed two new technologies to address these requirements: 1) a matching circuit technology that covers a wide impedance range and enables the IC to match a variety of antenna and board impedances without an external impedance-matching circuit; 2) a signal correction technology for locally generated reference signals that uses a small circuit to self correct inconsistencies in the circuit elements and variations in surrounding conditions without calibration.

Renesas has verified the effectiveness of these technologies on a Bluetooth LE RF transceiver circuit prototype built with a 22-nm CMOS process. With these new technologies, Renesas reduced the circuit area including the power supply to 0.84 mm2, the world’s smallest for a device of this type. This was achieved by modifying the receiver architecture to reduce the number of inductors and making enhancements such as a low-current baseband amplifier with a small mounting area and a highly efficient class-D amplifier. They offer power efficiency, with power consumption of 3.6 mW and 4.1 mW during reception and transmission respectively. These advances enable smaller size, reduced board cost, and lower power consumption.

Renesas