A 1.12 pJ/b Inductive Transceiver With a Fault-Tolerant Network Switch for Multi-Layer Wearable Body Area Network Applications

A near-field coupling transceiver integrated with a fault-tolerant network switch is implemented for inter-layer and intra-layer wearable body area network. The inductive coupling transceiver employs a resonance compensator (RC) with a digitally controlled on-chip capacitor bank and a variable hysteresis Schmitt trigger to compensate dynamic and static variances of woven inductor, and it enables 10 Mbps wireless transaction with the reception energy of 1.12 pJ/b at 2.5 V supply. The network switch introduces new fault-tolerant protocol to eliminate the routing table and reduces power consumption by 70% compared with the conventional switch using torus topology. The transceiver with the switch and the RC are implemented in 0.25-mum 1P5M CMOS process technology, occupying 2.0 mm² and 0.8 mm² area, respectively.