Research Article
Deepak Choudhary and Umesh Seh
Abstract
Recent years have seen the rapid development of biosensor technology, system-on-chip design and wireless technology and ubiquitous computing. When assembled into an autonomous body sensor network (BSN), the technologies become powerful tools in wellbeing monitoring, medical diagnostics, and personal connectivity. In this paper, we describe the first demonstration of a fully customized mixed-signal silicon chip that has most of the attributes required for use in a wearable or implantable BSN. Our intellectual-property blocks include low-power analog sensor interface for temperature and pH, a data multiplexing and conversion module, a digital platform based around microcontroller, data encoding for spread-spectrum wireless transmission, and a RF section requiring very few off-chip components. The chip has been fully evaluated and tested by connection to external sensors, and it satisfied typical system requirements.