A 15µW 16 channel E×G processor with data transition memory-quad level vector for wearable healthcare platform

A low power 16 channel E×G processor (E×P) is proposed for wearable healthcare system. It adopts two low power accelerators named data transition memory quad level vector (DTM-QLV) and coefficient interleaving FIR filter (CI-FIR). The proposed DTM-QLV reduces transmission power consumption by compressing the data size of 4 different kinds of ExG signals. It can decrease the memory capacity by 13% compared with the previous QLV, and results in power reduction by 1/80 of the conventional RISC processor. Moreover, the proposed CI-FIR can achieve 125 times power efficient operation by multiply-less architecture compared to the RISC processor. In addition, adaptive buffer-controlled gating (ABG) helps to operate only when signal should be processed so that the average power consumption can be significantly decreased to less than 15μW for 16 channel operation.