A Flexible End-to-End Dual ASIC Transceiver for OFDM Ultrasound In-Body Communication

Implanted medical devices need a reliable, low-energy and secure in-body communication link. Ultrasound (US) wave propagation is promising over other techniques due to its lower body attenuation, inherent security and well-studied physiological impact. While US communication systems have been proposed, they either neglect realistic channel conditions or fail to be integrated into small-scale, energy-scarce systems. This paper presents a highly flexible end-to-end ASIC transceiver with OFDM modulation tailored to robust intra-body US communication. This transceiver comprises a dual chip solution: i) a RISC-V microcontroller extended with two custom passband modulation accelerators implemented in 65nm CMOS; and ii) an analog front-end containing a 20V class-D power amplifier and low-power receive chain implemented in 180nm BCD. Under typical 10cm in-body channel attenuation, OFDM-16QAM modulation and 470kbps datarate, the transceiver achieves both in Tx and Rx mode a BER below 1e-4 consuming 64/20.9nJ/bit Tx/Rx.

ISBN:9781665469173

Jaar van publicatie:2022

Toegankelijkheid:Closed