A high-performance ibc-Hub transceiver for intra-body communication system

[[abstract]]We report a high-performance intra-body communication hub (IBC-hub) transceiver for IBC system, consisting of an onoff keying (OOK) transmitter and a clock and data recovery (CDR) receiver. We also demonstrate the signal transmission model of IBC. The OOK transmitter in the IBC-hub takes commands from the RF gateway, and then transmits them to the sensor node biomedical system-on-a-chip (SOC) through human body. The CDR receiver in the IBC-hub receives the biomedical signals (in digital format) from the sensor node biomedical SOC through human body, and then transfers them to the RF gateway through the micro-control unit. Such kind of transmission methodology in conjunction with our proposed IBC network is much more power-efficient than wireless communication. Moreover, since no antenna is required, small chip size is achieved. The OOK transmitter consumes 12.7 mW and achieves an output power of -11.36 dBm at 433 MHz. At supply voltage of 3 V, the CDR receiver consumes 2.2 mW and achieves RMS jitter and eye height (of the data eye diagram) of 1.81 ns and 2.747 V, respectively, in the condition of locking to a 2 Mb/s pseudo-random binary sequence with length of 27 - 1. The measured bit-error rate in IBC transmission is 2.44 x 10-9, better than previous work in the literature. The excellent results indicate the IBC-hub transceiver is suitable for IBC system. (C) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 54:11431153, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.26797[[note]]SC