A 2.75mW wideband correlation-based transceiver for body-coupled communication

Electronic devices in contact or in close proximity to the human body can use its conductive properties to establish body coupled communication (BCC) between each other. This human centric communication paradigm can be used for wireless body-area networks to reduce the impact of interference on/from RF systems, to avoid the fading effect that the body has on radio systems and to enable power efficient, high data-rate wireless links. In this work 1.2 V digital signals for TX are used, an RX band of 1 to 30 MHz is chosen and a new robust BCC architecture is proposed that altogether provide reliable performance in the presence of interference. The measured BER and jitter show that performance competitive to the cognitive FSK approach can be achieved with a simpler implementation. The energy consumption at 8.5 Mb/s is 0.32nJ/b, lower than (0.37nJ/b), and the core area is 0.19mm².