A voltage-scalable biomedical signal processor running ECG using 13pJ/cycle at 1MHz and 0.4V

Recent work on designing ultra-low-power systems has focused on the sub-threshold regime [1–3] and an energy efficiency of a few pJ/cycle was reported. While operating at the minimum energy point is attractive for energy-frugal devices like those used for wireless biomedical signal monitoring, the achieved clock frequency is usually in the kHz range. The low frequency combined with limited processing capacity, small on-chip memory, and low computation precision prevents the use of these systems for complex ambulatory monitoring beyond a simple ECG algorithm. Low-voltage systems with more computational power are demonstrated in [4] and [5].