Power consumption is one of the most critical issues when designing low‐cost electronic devices, such as sensing nodes in wireless sensor networks. To support their operation, such systems usually contain a battery; however, when the battery has consumed all its energy, the node (e.g. the sensor) must be retrieved and the battery replaced. If the node is located in a remote and non‐accessible placement, battery replacement can become an expensive (and even impossible) task. This way, energy harvesting has emerged as a suitable alternative to supply low‐power electronic systems, by converting ambient energy into electric power. Scavenged energy can be used to directly supply the circuits, or stored to be used when needed. This paper summarises the power needs of a general wireless sensor node and describes the main principles of most representative energy harvesting technologies. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SUMMARYLow-frequency (flicker) noise is one of the most important issues in the design of direct-conversion zero-IF front-ends. Within the front-end building blocks, the direct-conversion mixer is critical in terms of flicker noise, since it performs the signal down-conversion to baseband. This paper analyzes the main sources of low-frequency noise in Gilbert-cell-based direct-conversion mixers, and several issues for minimizing the flicker noise while keeping a good mixer performance in terms of gain, noise figure and power consumption are introduced in a quantitative manner. In order to verify these issues, a CMOS Gilbert-cell-based zero-IF mixer has been fabricated and measured. A flicker noise as low as 10.4 dB is achieved (NF at 10 kHz) with a power consumption of only 2 mA from a 2.7 V power supply. More than 14.6 dB conversion gain and noise figure lower than 9 dB (DSB) are obtained from DC to 2.5 GHz with an LO power of −10 dBm, which makes this mixer suitable for a multi-standard low-power zero-IF front-end.

We present a novel radio-frequency identification (RFID) system with capability of localization and tracking of passive or semi-passive tags. Localization and tracking features are enabled by backscatter modulation on ultra-wide bandwidth tag's antenna. A ultra-high frequency signal allows the wake-up of the tags enabling the reduction of energy consumption and ensuring compatibility with existing RFID systems. The overall system as well as the reader and tag architectures are introduced. The localization and tracking performance evaluation is presented in some reference scenarios