A 33μW/node Duty Cycle Controlled HBC Transceiver system for medical BAN with 64 sensor nodes

A low power Human Body Communication (HBC) Transceiver (TRX) with Duty Cycle Control (DCC) is proposed for low energy medical body area network (BAN) system To achieve a fully IEEE standard compatible system with a low power consumption, 1) a MAC scheduler and 2) a HBC modem with maximum likelihood detection (MLD) scheme are proposed. Thanks to DCC, 38% average duty and 96.6% quality of service (QoS) are achieved with 2.77mW power consumption for the 64 sensor nodes and a hub. The RF circuits in the TRX fully satisfy the WBAN standard requirements. And the reconfigurable LNA is designed to monitor power consumption with the received signal strength. The Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is adopted to support DCC and RF TRX, and zero-delay cipher (ZDC) is used to protect the data privacy without extra network delay. The proposed TRX chip occupies 12.5mm
²
in 0.13μm CMOS technology.