Design of an RF Transceiver and a Two-channel Analog Front-end Amplifier for Bio-medical Applications
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Tsai, Yi-Lin
Abstract
Short-range wireless communication systems such as multichannel sensing/monitoring system and body area network (BAN) are increasingly popular in recent years because of the convenience. A bio-medical system-on-a-chip (SoC) is usually employed in such application scenarios. Due to limited battery power, an energy-efficient wireless transceiver is highly desirable to extend battery life. Therefore, conventional mixer-based transceivers using power hungry mixers and frequency synthesizers are not the ideal choice for this application. The first part of this dissertation reports a BPSK transmitter which adopts Phase-MUX and edge-combining techniques. Current reuse technique is employed in the power amplifier and the edge combiner, which achieves low-power target. Because high-frequency only exists in the PA path, the local oscillator can operate in the low-frequency band. Fabricated in TSMC 0.18-μm CMOS, the transmitter only consumes 0.33 mW at 20-Mbps data rate. The output power is -15 dBm with an EVM of 10%. The second part presents an energy-efficient 400-MHz D-BPSK receiver. The proposed D-BPSK receiver adopts injection locking technique to perform amplitude-to-phase conversion. This technique can demodulate the PSK modulated signal with envelope detector. The proposed receiver demodulates D-BPSK signal without using Costas loop and mixers, which leads to reduced power consumption and cost. The receiver is fabricated in TSMC 0.18-um CMOS technology. It consumes 1.77 mW with 0.9-V supply. The system sensitivity is -63 dBm. The energy efficiency is 177 pJ/bit with 10-Mbps input signal. In a bio-medical SoC, multiple channels occupy significant chip area, while their independence leads to gain mismatches. The third chip demonstrates a low-crosstalk and small-area two-channel instrumentation amplifier. The proposed orthogonal frequency chopping technique is utilized to separate tiny signals from two different channels. Additionally, these two different signals can be enlarged by the single shared operational amplifier. Low crosstalk means less interference between these two channels. Furthermore, the shared amplifier can reduce gain mismatch between these two channels. Fabricated in TSMC 0.35-um CMOS, the two-channel instrumentation amplifier consumes 27 uA from a 3-V supply, achieving -83-dB crosstalk and 0.061-mm2 chip area.
Subjects
analog front-end amplifier
low-power transceiver
dynamic phase-to-amplitude conversion
SDGs
Type
thesis
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