Low-power signal processing devices for portable ECG detection

An analog front end for diagnosing and monitoring the behavior of the heart is presented. This sensing front end has two low-power processing devices, including a 5^th-order Butterworth operational transconductance-C (OTA-C) filter and an 8-bit successive approximation analog-to-digital converter (SAADC). The components fabricated in a 0.18-μm CMOS technology feature with power consumptions of 453 nW (filter) and 940 nW (ADC) at a supply voltage of 1 V, respectively. The system specifications in terms of output noise and linearity associated with the two integrated circuits are described in this paper.