Backscattered Software-Defined Radio for Flexible, Reusable and Upgradeable Transmitters with 34-58 pJ/bit Energy Across Common Standards in 180 nm

A software-defined backscattered transmitter is presented for die reuse across applications and upgrade over device lifespan. Energy down to few tens of $\mathbf{p J} / \mathbf{b i t}$ for pervasive connectivity is achieved via a DAC-less architecture comprising 1) time-based jitter/power-tunable symbol generation for PSK/FSK/ASK modulations, 2) eFPGA supporting full and flexible PHY and filter-less over-sampling for pulse shaping (e.g., GFSK in BLE). $180-\mathrm{nm}$ demonstration of communications with commodity hardware in several standards is shown.