Physiological signals such as body temperature, heart rates and electrocardiogram (ECG) have been widely utilized for health monitoring applications. In order to detect the signals without cumbersome wires, heterogeneous body sensor nodes including wearable or implantable biomedical devices are wirelessly connected to each other forming a personal body sensor network (BSN). The physiological signals show different bandwidth and require various transmission rates. Therefore, each sensor node needs a low power and scalable wireless transceiver running at the pertinent data rates for energy-efficient transmission. Since the previously reported transceiver had a fixed data rate of 2Mb/s without any modulation, it is not suitable for BSNs over the shared body channel. This project presents a low power and scalable PHY transceiver integrated with an energy-efficient baseband processing unit. It enables packet-based data communications between the sensor nodes over the shared body channel. The reception bit energy of the transceiver chip is 0.19nJ/b, which is 50 times more efficient than the recently reported UWB receiver (9.6nJ/b) for wearable and wireless body area networks.

1. The preamble with the sensor ID for fast packet detection

2. Wake-up pulse detector

3. Hierarchical block gating

- Accurately estimate the channel dependency on frequency and distance

- Frequency response of the body channel & circuit model

  - ISSCC 07 [pdf]

  - TMTT 07 [pdf]