A 80-uW 2-Mb/s transceiver for human body channel binaural communication

Abstract

We use a body channel and a low-power transceiver design to achieve binaural communication for hearing aids. The measured bandwidth of the body channel is 1 MHz to 7.5 MHz. The transmitter encodes and transmits data of 2-Mb/s and 1-V peak-to-peak square waveform to the electrodes connected to the body. The receiver includes an analog front end (AFE), an all-digital data recovery circuit and a decoder. This chip is implemented with a 65-nm CMOS process using 0.5-V supply in the digital transceiver and 1-V supply in the AFE. When working at 2 Mb/s, the power consumption is only 80 uW.