A 505nW Programmable NanoController in 22 nm FDSOI-CMOS for Autonomous Ultra-Low-Power Mixed-Signal SoCs

The realization of autonomous, wearable, and implantable Systems-on-Chip (SoC) for health monitoring applications poses several challenges, such as achieving ultra-low size, cost, and power consumption, yet offering sufficient flexibility to re-program and adapt the autonomously operating SoC during the course of treatment. Commonly, programmability is not considered for ultra-low-power biomedical SoCs, since a dedicated finite state machine fixes the operation sequence. This work proposes a combination of a programmable NanoController with a SAR ADC, for potential use in ultra-low-power wearable or implantable biomedical SoCs, and integrates it as a prototype chip in a 22nm FDSOI-CMOS technology. The proposed NanoController achieves an extremely low power consumption of 505nW when programmed for 10-bit SAR ADC control and a sample rate of 100 kSamples/s. This result shows that energy efficiency and programmability during operation are not mutually exclusive for smart ultra-low-power biomedical platform chips. Based on the results of this prototype chip, a fully-integrated glucose sensor chip has been designed and submitted for fabrication, which will be evaluated in future work.