An IEEE 802.15.4 baseband SoC for tracking applications in the medical environment based on Actel Cortex-M1 soft-core

In this paper, we present the design of a baseband System-On-Chip for tracking applications in the medical environment based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard which can be used to track patient location in hospitals. It utilizes an ARM Cortex-M1 soft-core, 16 kb of SRAM and a bus architecture based on the AHB-Lite specification. The IEEE 802.15.4 MAC primitives are implemented in a Flash-ROM of 32 kb. The hardware verification was done in an Actel M1AFS1500 130 nm LVCMOS FPGA. The total logic usage of the FPGA was 81 % (31142 core cells). The power consumption of the IEEE 802.15.4 implementation was 25.438 mW at 1.5V power supply and 8 MHz clock rate.