Design considerations of a low-noise receiver front-end and its spiral coil for portable NMR screening

Author

Diyang Zhao ; Ka-Meng Lei ; Pui-In Mak ; Man-Kay Law ; Martins, Rui P.

Author_Institution

State Key Lab. of Analog & Mixed-Signal VLSI, Univ. of Macau, Macao, China

fYear

2014

fDate

17-20 Nov. 2014

Firstpage

403

Lastpage

406

Abstract

This paper reports the co-design of a low-noise receiver front-end and its exciting-sensing coil for portable nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) screening of chemical/biological droplets operating at 21.3MHz (0.5T magnet). To minimize the noise contribution of the receiver front-end and its coil compared to the induced signal, EM analysis is involved to optimize the geometry of the off-chip coil with the input-referred noise of the receiver front-end taken into account. By choosing a proper geometry of the coil, the resulted SNR of the receiver front-end was shown to be maximized with the dedicated input-referred noise of the receiver. Simulated in 180nm CMOS, the receiver front-end shows an input-referred noise as low as 920.11pV/√Hz at 25.2mW of power, and the estimated die area is ~2mm².

Keywords

CMOS integrated circuits; biological NMR; mixers (circuits); receivers; EM analysis; chemical-biological droplets; frequency 21.3 MHz; low-noise receiver front-end; off-chip coil; portable NMR screening; portable nuclear magnetic resonance screening; spiral coil; Coils; Geometry; Mixers; Nuclear magnetic resonance; Receivers; Signal to noise ratio;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Circuits and Systems (APCCAS), 2014 IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on

Conference_Location

Ishigaki

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/APCCAS.2014.7032805

Filename

7032805