Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have many applications ranging from military and defense to environmental and health monitoring. These networks work based on sensing devices known as sensor nodes which can be used to sense any sort of physical or environmental changes. The wireless transceiver is the largest consumer of energy in a wireless node. Therefore, these transceivers must be extremely power efficient, both when viewed in terms of standby power and energy per transmitted bit.

Among different standards that exist for WSNs, the 902-928 MHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band has been selected for this project. The key challenges in the design of low power nodes include: Energy efficient transmission and reception; low-power sleep mode for listening; and a short delay time between sleep mode and active mode.  New architectures are being developed that address these challenges with the target of sub mW active mode and 10s of µW listening mode.