Ultra-low power 2.4GHz radio for healthcare applications
Posted on Mar 31, 2011
At the ISSCC 2011 conference, Holst Centre, imec and Panasonic presented their results on an ultra-low power radio chip for wireless body-area networks (WBAN). Such networks are used for communication among sensor nodes operating on, in or around the human body, e.g. for healthcare purposes. In view of energy autonomy, the total energy consumption of the sensor nodes should be minimized.
Current results show an ultra-low-power single-chip transceiver, taped out in 90nm CMOS. Next to the direct modulation transmitter and receiver RF front-ends, the chip integrates analog and digital baseband, phase-locked loop (PLL) functionality (for signal stabilization and recognition) and additional programmability for flexible data rates. Power consumption of the entire chip is below 1 milliwatt in receive or transmit mode. Compared to state-of-the-art, the radio chip achieves a better sensitivity for higher data rates with lower or comparable power consumption. Holst Centre and its partners demonstrate the low-power potential of the radio chip in a wireless ECG senor node.
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