A 5.4-mW 180-cm Transmission Distance 2.5-Mb/s Advanced Techniques-Based Novel Intrabody Communication Receiver Analog Front End

Abstract

This paper presents a low power, long-transmission distance, high data rate intrabody communication (IBC) analog receiver front end (RFE). First, to optimize the transmission performance, conventional transmission line analysis scheme is creatively adopted to the IBC design to characterize the body channel. Second, switched-capacitor filters based on sampling rate boosting technique are adopted for higher accuracy and lower power consumption. Third, a novel RFE topology is proposed to further enhance the IBC performance. The new RFE is designed and fabricated in a standard 180-nm CMOS process. Measurement results show that the RFE can successfully transmit data spanning the whole human body, around 180 cm, which is one of the longest transmission distances reported in related literatures. Furthermore, it reaches a maximum data rate of 2.5 Mb/s with a bit error rate less than 1e-7 and consumes 5.4 mW from a 1.8 V supply. The proposed RFE compares favorably to similar reported works.Index Terms-Bit error rate (BER), intrabody communication (IBC), matching network, receiver front end (RFE), sampling rate boosting, switched-capacitor (SC) filter, transmission distance, transmission line (TL).

Device Pairing at the Touch of an Electrode

“…Our design of the intra-body communication channel is inspired by [33]. The authors of [33] are among the first to report reliable intra-body transmission based on capacitive coupling.…”

“…The authors of [33] are among the first to report reliable intra-body transmission based on capacitive coupling. Their designed receiver front-end achieves a transmission distance that spans the entire body.…”

“…Our goal is to establish hand-to-hand transmission which typically reach around 180 cm for adults. We therefore adopted the impedance matching network proposed in [33] and followed the design choices found in Table I.…”

“…Intrabody communication was first proposed in 1995 [38] and has since been covered in a large body of research literature: Numerous proposals on different transmission methods, receiver and transmitter types, as well as modulation techniques have been published, e.g., [8], [33], [37]. These and other promising results motivated the definition of intra-body communication as a physical communication layer in the relatively new IEEE 802.15.6 standard [17] which is the latest international standard covering Wireless Body Area Networks (BANs).…”

Cascaded Network Body Channel Model for Intrabody Communication

“…Once the S parameters of the transmission channel are obtained, we can use an impedance matching strategy to optimize the channel so that the power injected into the load is maximized. This method was used in our previous work in [24] to increase the transmission performance. However, in [24], only hand to hand transmission scenario with fixed carrier frequency was studied, obviously lacking generalization.…”