Recently the energy efficiency (EE) in wireless communication is becoming one of the key performance metric for wireless communicating systems. For battery driven system like wireless sensor networks and ad-hoc networks, the energy conservation is a critical factor for node life. In addition, the spectral efficiency (SE) has been traditionally used as a performance index for wireless transmission. This paper investigates the optimum spectral to energy efficiency tradeoff especially for short range communications. The analysis starts with the Shannon case in additive white gaussian noise channel where some theoretic results are developed when considering both transmit and circuit energy. Then, point to point communication system with uncoded M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) is considered. At the device layer, a system level power consumption model is proposed. At the physical layer, a novel and accurate approximation of the bit error rate (BER) function of the signal to noise ratio is made. The total energy per bit is formulated and the link between the Shannon limit capacity and MQAM based communication is established. The impact of distance, bandwidth, power consumption and BER as a quality-of-service parameter on EE–SE tradeoff is analyzed. It is shown that, varying distance, bandwidth and circuit power consumption induce more impact in the low SE regime whereas, the BER has more impact on the high SE regime. Moreover, the energy optimal spectral efficiency for MQAM is obtained in closed-form and confirmed by numerical results.