A low-power asynchronous ECG acquisition system in CMOS technology

An asynchronous electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition system is presented for wearable ambulatory monitoring. The proposed system consists of a low noise front-end amplifier (AFE) with tunable bandwidth, an asynchronous analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and digital signal processing (DSP). Data compression is achieved by the inherent signal dependent sampling rate of the asynchronous architecture. This makes the system attractive for compact wearable ECG monitoring applications. The AFE and ADC were fabricated in a 0.18μm CMOS technology and consume a total of 79μW. Measured results demonstrating ECG monitoring are presented.