Low-power Radio Design: Introduction and Passive RF Circuits

This lecture introduces the field of Internet of Things (IoT) with a focus on wireless communication aspects, standards, and trade-offs in designing IoT nodes. It covers passive RF circuits, impedance matching, and the importance of energy efficiency in IoT devices. The course delves into various radio architectures, receiver designs, oscillators, and power amplifiers relevant to IoT nodes. The lecture emphasizes the necessity of duty cycling to reduce power consumption and discusses the dominance of wireless communication power in IoT nodes. It also explores energy harvesting techniques, IoT node architectures, and the communication-computation tradeoff. The lecture concludes with insights on impedance matching networks and practical examples of impedance matching techniques.