A battery-less 31 µW HBC receiver with RF energy harvester for implantable devices

A power-efficient human body channel (HBC) RX IC which operates without an external battery is implemented in 65 nm CMOS mixed mode process with 0.6 V supply voltage. The HBC RX IC is designed to receive intermittent data from an external device while generating power by itself. The HBC RX IC integrates an ambient RF energy harvester (EH), a wireless power transfer (WPT)-based wake-up receiver (WuRX), and a low-power main HBC RX. The ambient RF EH harvests standby power of the proposed HBC IC with dynamic input range. The WPT-based WuRX receives incoming wake-up signal and generates power for main HBC RX with 68% power conversion efficiency (PCE) at the same time. The main HBC RX demodulates both ASK and FSK information with the same oscillation with 31 μW low-power consumption. As a result, the proposed HBC RX IC works stand-alone while performing 0.97 μW standby power and 31 μW active power with 0.13nJ/b energy efficiency.