A 75 μW Real-Time Scalable Body Area Network Controller and a 25 μW ExG Sensor IC for Compact Sleep Monitoring Applications

• Published in: IEEE journal of solid-state circuits 2012, Vol.47 (1), p.323-334
• Main Authors: LEE, Seulki, LONG YAN, ROH, Taehwan, HONG, Sunjoo, YOO, Hoi-Jun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Data transmission; Design. Technologies. Operation analysis. Testing; Electronics; Exact sciences and technology; General equipment and techniques; Instruments, apparatus, components and techniques common to several branches of physics and astronomy; Integrated circuits; Monitoring; Networks; Numerical control; Physics; Real time; Semiconductor electronics. Microelectronics. Optoelectronics. Solid state devices; Sensors; Sensors (chemical, optical, electrical, movement, gas, etc.); remote sensing; Sleep; Transmitters
• ISSN: 0018-9200; 1558-173X
• DOI: 10.1109/JSSC.2011.2170636

A light-weighted body area network using 3-layer coin-sized fabric patches is proposed for sleep monitoring systems. It consists of two ICs, a network controller (NC) and a sensor node (SN), and also Wearable Band (W-Band) to connect them. The Continuous Data Transmission (CDT) protocol is proposed for low power and real-time scalability by in-order data transmission using W-Band among several sensors. Based on this protocol, Linked List based network Manager (LLM) and Adaptive Dual Mode Controller (ADMC) in NC, and low swing data transmitter (D-TX) and its own back-end circuits are introduced. The LLM and ADMC can adaptively change the network configuration according to the dynamic network variances in real-time ( Unknown character 500 ms), and D-TX can make low energy data transmitter of 0.33 pJ/b with 20 Mbps data rate for W-Band interface. These two low power ICs, which are implemented in 0.18 mu hbox m CMOS process and operates with 1.5 V supply, consume 75 mu hbox W and 25 mu hbox W , respectively.