Micromachines (Jan 2018)

Design Considerations for a Sub-mW Wireless Medical Body-Area Network Receiver Front End

  • Ehsan Kargaran,
  • Danilo Manstretta,
  • Rinaldo Castello

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/mi9010031
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9, no. 1
p. 31

Abstract

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Wireless medical body-area networks are used to connect sensor nodes that monitor vital parameters. The radio consumes a large portion of the sensor energy budget, and hence its power dissipation should be minimized. The low-noise amplifier (LNA) is an important component of the receiver, and must guarantee low-noise amplification and impedance matching. In this work, an ultra-low-voltage ultra-low-power LNA is proposed that, thanks to the proposed transformer-based gate boosting technique, has a reduced current consumption of only 160 μA and can operate with a supply as low as 0.18 V. The LNA was designed using 40 nm Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology and features a voltage gain of 14 dB, 5.2 dB NF and −8.6 dBm IIP3. This performance is comparable to a prior work by the same authors, but with the minimum supply voltage reduced by a factor of 4x.

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