A 0.8 V, 14.76 nVrms, Multiplexer-Based AFE for Wearable Devices Using 45 nm CMOS Techniques

Abstract

Wearable medical devices (WMDs) that continuously monitor health conditions enable people to stay healthy in everyday situations. A wristband is a monitoring format that can measure bioelectric signals. The main part of a wearable device is its analog front end (AFE). Wearables have issues such as low reliability, high power consumption, and large size. A conventional AFE device uses more analog-to-digital converters, amplifiers, and filters for individual electrodes. Our proposed MUX-based AFE design requires fewer components than a conventional AFE device, reducing power consumption and area. It includes a single-ended differential feedback operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) and n-pass MUX-based AFE circuits which are related to the emergence of low power, low area, and low cost AFE-integrated chips that are required for wearable biomedical applications. The proposed 6T n-pass multiplexer measures a gain of −68 dB across a frequency range of 100 kHz with a 136.5 nW power consumption and a delay of 0.07 ns. The design layout area is approximately 9.8 µm2 and uses 45 nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Additionally, the proposed single-ended differential OTA has an obtained input referred noise of 0.014 µVrms, and a gain of −5.5 dB, while the design layout area is about 2 µm2 and was designed with the help of the Cadence Virtuoso layout design tool.

Keywords

• wearable medical devices (WMD)
• analog front end (AFE)
• operational transconductance amplifier
• analog multiplexer
• CMOS
• Cadence Virtuoso