A 2.4 GHz ULP OOK Single-Chip Transceiver for Healthcare Applications

• Published in: IEEE transactions on biomedical circuits and systems 2011-12, Vol.5 (6), p.523-534
• Main Authors: Vidojkovic, M., Huang, X., Harpe, P., Rampu, S., Zhou, C., Huang, L., van de Molengraft, J., Imamura, K., Busze, B., Bouwens, F., Konijnenburg, M., Santana, J., Breeschoten, A., Huisken, J., Philips, K., Dolmans, G., de Groot, H.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Body area networks; CMOS technology; Healthcare applications; Low power electronics; super-regenerative receiver; Transceivers; ultra-low power transceivers; wireless body area network (WBAN); Wireless communication
• ISSN: 1932-4545; 1940-9990
• DOI: 10.1109/TBCAS.2011.2173340

This paper describes an ultra-low power (ULP) single chip transceiver for wireless body area network (WBAN) applications. It supports on-off keying (OOK) modulation, and it operates in the 2.36-2.4 GHz medical BAN and 2.4-2.485 GHz ISM bands. It is implemented in 90 nm CMOS technology. The direct modulated transmitter transmits OOK signal with 0 dBm peak power, and it consumes 2.59 mW with 50% OOK. The transmitter front-end supports up to 10 Mbps. The transmitter digital baseband enables digital pulse-shaping to improve spectrum efficiency. The super-regenerative receiver front-end supports up to 5 Mbps with -75 dBm sensitivity. Including the digital part, the receiver consumes 715 μW at 1 Mbps data rate, oversampled at 3 MHz. At the system level the transceiver achieves PER=10 -2 at 25 meters line of site with 62.5 kbps data rate and 288 bits packet size. The transceiver is integrated in an electrocardiogram (ECG) necklace to monitor the heart's electrical property.