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Smart Sensors and Systems pp 359–385Cite as

Design of Ultra-Low-Power Electrocardiography Sensors

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Abstract

In this chapter, we present two key designs for ultra-low-power electrocardiography sensors, i.e., an event-driven analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and an on-off keying (OOK) transceiver. For the ADC, two QRS detection algorithms, pulse-triggered (PUT) and time-assisted PUT (t-PUT), are proposed based on the level-crossing events generated from the ADC. For the transceiver SoC, we propose a novel supply isolation scheme to avoid the instability induced by such a high receiver gain, use bond wires as inductors to reduce the transmitter power, and utilize near-threshold design (NTD) method for low power digital baseband. Fabricated in 0.13 \(\upmu \mathrm{m}\) CMOS technology, the ADC with QRS detector consumes only 220 nW measured under 300 mV power supply, making it the first nanoWatt compact analog-to-information (A2I) converter with embedded QRS detector. The transceiver SoC is fully integrated with a 10 Mb/s transceiver, digital processing units, an 8051 micro-controlled unit (MCU), a successive approximation (SAR) ADC, and etc. The receiver consumes 0.214 nJ/bit at − 65 dBm sensitivity, and the Tx energy efficiency is 0.285 nJ/bit at an output power of − 5. 4 dBm. In addition, the digital baseband consumes 34.8 pJ/bit with its supply voltage lowered to 0.55 V, indicating its energy per bit is reduced to nearly 1/4 of the super-threshold operation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ECE Department, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Xiaoyang Zhang, Yongfu Li, Lei Wang & Yong Lian

  2. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Wei Zou, Yinan Sun, Yongpan Liu, Huazhong Yang & Bo Zhao

Authors
  1. Xiaoyang Zhang
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  2. Yongfu Li
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  3. Lei Wang
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  4. Wei Zou
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  7. Huazhong Yang
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  8. Yong Lian
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  9. Bo Zhao
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Correspondence to Bo Zhao .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Tsing Hua University, Hsichu, Taiwan

    Youn-Long Lin

  2. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea, DPR (North Korea)

    Chong-Min Kyung

  3. Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

    Hiroto Yasuura

  4. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Yongpan Liu

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Zhang, X. et al. (2015). Design of Ultra-Low-Power Electrocardiography Sensors. In: Lin, YL., Kyung, CM., Yasuura, H., Liu, Y. (eds) Smart Sensors and Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14711-6_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14711-6_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-14710-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14711-6

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