Ultrasonic Wake-Up Receiver for An Ultra-Low Power Communication Platform

Abstract:
This paper presents an ultrasonic receiver that implements a wake-up functionality to save energy. A small form factor allows flexible use in a variety of systems. The presented ultrasonic communication platform uses piezo crystals as transducers with a resonant frequency of 2 MHz, which couple sound waves into a steel bar. Due to high acoustic damping, a weak signal of -50 dBm is received after 1 meter. A demonstrator is built and tested using off-the-shelf components.