A Self-Synchronizing, Low-Power, Low-Complexity Transceiver for Body-Coupled Communication

This paper presents a self-synchronizing, low-power, low-complexity body-coupled communication (BCC) transceiver using the recently proposed Pulsed-Index Communication (PIC) techniques. The unique features of these techniques are used to simplify the BCC transceiver hardware and reduce its power consumption by eliminating the need for circuitries dedicated to clock and data recovery (CDR) and duty cycle correction. The self-synchronizing feature of the transceiver is achieved by exploiting the edge-coding property of PIC which consists of using pulse edges for encoding and detecting transmitted pulses rather than bit times or duty cycles. A working prototype of the proposed BCC transceiver using off-the-shelf components is developed and used to test, for the first time, a full, bi-directional BCC link by transmitting arbitrary 16-bit data words through the human body over a range of 150cm with zero bit-error rate and sub-1nJ/bit energy efficiency.