Ultra-low Power Circuit and System Design for Deployable Body-worn Devices

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2012Recent advances in ultra-low power chip design techniques, many originally targeting wireless sensor networks, will enable a new generation of body-worn devices for health monitoring. Off-the-shelf chips often consume too much power and are usally too bulky for body-worn applications. In this thesis, I have contributed in advancing the state-of-the-art ultra-low power circuit design techniques, including low-noise bioamplifiers for ExG (e.g. ECG, EMG, EEG, etc.) and neural applications, analog signal processors targeted for but not limited to ECoG applicaitons, transmitter and receiver for short-range wireless. In addition, I have also helped realizing the next-generation wireless sensing system ICs that aim at prolonging battery life, even eliminating the battery leveraging emerging energy-harvesting solutions. Lastly, a few works presented in the thesis (such as the "Bumblebee", "SoCWISP") have not only been published as literatures, but also deployed at various labs assisting scientists to perform experiments that are difficult if not impossible to be done otherwise