Design of Low-Power Low-Voltage Biomedical Amplifier for Electrocardiogram Signal Recording

The demand for health-monitoring products is increasing worldwide. Low-power and low-voltage attributes are important concerns that need to be addressed in circuits used for personal health-monitoring applications, to achieve a long battery life. In this paper, a biomedical amplifier is designed for electrocardiogram (ECG) signal detection. The design comprises of a high pass filter (HPF), an operational transconductance amplifier (OTA), two dB-linear variable gain amplifiers, three low pass filters (LPF), and an operational transresistance amplifier (ORA). In particular, the VGA and the LPF uses the log companding technique. The bio-amplifier consumes less than 20 μW of power from a 1 V single supply. The circuit is implemented in 0.18 μm CMOS technology.