Long-Rangeultrasound Wake-Up Receiver with a Piezoelectric Nanoscale Ultrasound Transducer (pNUT)

Abstract

We report on the first implementation of a long-range wake-up receiver (WuRx) enabled by an aggressively scaled 100 nm thick aluminum nitride transducer that occupies an area of only $100\ \mu \mathrm{m}\ \times\ 100\ \mu \mathrm{m}$. This piezoelectric Nanoscale Ultrasound Transducer (pNUT) offers the same sensitivity and characteristic impedance of its microscale counterparts but enables “dust-like” WuRx because of its dramatically reduced size. We validate this concept by synthesizing a WuRx using a pNUT and off-the-shelf electronic components forming a voltage amplifier, an envelope detector and a comparator (Fig. 1). We demonstrate robust data transfer over a range of 0.5 m when operating with a 40 kHz carrier signal modulated at 250Hz. Based on these measurements we extrapolate the device performance at resonance to show that communication over> 10m is possible without increasing the WuRx area.