An analog receiver front-end for capacitive body-coupled communication

This paper presents an analog receiver front-end design (AFE) for capacitive body-coupled digital baseband receiver. The most important theoretical aspects of human body electrical model in the perspective of capacitive body-coupled communication (BCC) have also been discussed and the constraints imposed by gain and input-referred noise on the receiver front-end are derived from digital communication theory. Three different AFE topologies have been designed in ST 40-nm CMOS technology node which is selected to enable easy integration in today´s system-on-chip environments. Simulation results show that the best AFE topology consisting of a multi-stage AC-coupled preamplifier followed by a Schmitt trigger achieves 57.6 dB gain with an input referred noise PSD of 4.4 nV/√Hz at 6.8 mW.