The design of optimized programmable transmitter and receiver architectures for an integrated sensor microsystem

The utilization of wireless miniaturized electronic systems in medical diagnosis has been made possible by the emergence of system-on-chip technology. Communication systems targeting miniaturized sensor microsystem networks are characterized by their restricted power and area constraints. When considering the design of the telecommunication system for such a network, the receiver is the key performance critical block. This paper describes research work carried out on studying the impact of input data characteristics and internal data path complexity on area and power performance of the receiver. We have designed a number of optimized programmable transmitter and receiver architectures specifically for an integrated microsystem and studied their power/area characteristics. We demonstrate that up to 59% and 11% savings in area and power, respectively, could be achieved by optimizing input data size and internal register width for a particular application while maintaining signal quality and a certain degree of programmability.