A 65nm 63.3µW 15Mbps Transceiver with Switched-Capacitor Adiabatic Signaling and Combinatorial-Pulse-Position Modulation for Body-Worn Video-Sensing AR Nodes

Recent advances in audio-visual augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) demands 1) high speed (>10Mbps) data transfer among wearable devices around the human body with 2) low transceiver (TRX) power consumption for longer lifetime, especially as communication energy/b is often orders of magnitude higher than computation energy/switching. While WiFi can transmit compressed video (HD 30fps, compressed @6-12Mbps), it consumes 50-to-400mW power. Bluetooth, on the other hand, is not designed for video transfer. New mm-Wave links can support the required bandwidth but do not support ultra-low-power (<1mW). In recent years, Human-Body Communication (HBC) [1]–[6] has emerged as a promising low-power alternative to traditional wireless communication. However, previous implementations of HBC transmitters (Tx) suffer from a large plate-to-plate capacitance (C
p
, between signal electrode and local ground of the transmitter) which results in a power consumption of aC
p
V2f (Fig. 16.6.1) in voltage-mode (VM) HBC. The recently proposed Resonant HBC [6] tries to overcome this problem by resonating C
p
with a parallel inductor (L). However, the operating frequency is usually < a few 10's of MHz for low-power Electro-Quasistatic (EQS) operation, resulting in a large/bulky inductor. Moreover, the resonant LC
p
circuit has a large settling time (≈5Q
²
RC
P
, where R is the effective series resistance of the inductor) for EQS frequencies which will limit the maximum symbol rate to <1MSps for a 21MHz carrier (the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for HBC), making resonant HBC infeasible for> 10Mb/s applications.