A 0.6V 3.8μW ECG/bio-impedance monitoring IC for disposable health patch in 40nm CMOS
Summary (1 min read)
I. INTRODUCTION
- Chronic cardiovascular-respiratory diseases, like congestive heart failure (CHF) and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), require long-term, continuous and comfortable monitoring of ECG and bio-impedance (BioZ) to detect abnormal heart rate, respiration and body fluid volume.
- For miniaturized, lightweight and lowcost disposable patches, alternative power sources such as organic paper batteries, 3D printed batteries or thermal energy harvesters are more interesting than bulky Lithium-ion cells.
- Furthermore, a low supply AFE enables better cointegration with digital cells to facilitate power-efficient and on-the-node signal processing.
- This work presents a 0.6V 3.8μW AFE (Fig. 1 ) including an instrumentation amplifier (IA), a BioZ current source (CS) and a SAR ADC to facilitate simultaneous monitoring of ECG and BioZ.
- At channel outputs, both ECG and BioZ signals are modulated back to the baseband respectively without interfering each other.
B. Instrumenation Amplifier (CCIA)
- The biggest design challenge for a 0.6V bio-amplifier is to ensure almost rail-to-rail input and output dynamic range in the presence of large external signals (300mV DEO, baseline drift and mains CM variations).
- They suffer from distortion with the presence of a large CM input signal.
- Hence, the noise due to multiple feedback paths is reduced.
- The input impedance of the CCIA is boosted by two pre-charging buffers placed after the input chopper (Fig. 6 ), this is similar to [8] but with a different clocking scheme.
- The buffers are periodically connected to the signal path for 15.625µs whenever the chopping clock switches.
C. BioZ Current Generator
- Since most of BioZ activities (e.g., respiration, body fluid volume) are below 10Hz, a main design challenge is to reduce the CG's 1/f noise for improved sensitivity.
- Apart from noise, achieving a large compliance range under 0.6V supply is also important.
- This ensures that the CS remains operational when considering voltage drop over the electrode impedance, which is typically larger than the BioZ.
- To meet these requirements, the CS has dynamic element matching (DEM) between all unit current mirrors to modulate their 1/f noise to f DEM /(N+1) (Fig. 7 ), where N is the current amplification factor.
- The CG utilizes active cascode current mirrors to improve the voltage compliance, where two OTAs regulate the V ds of all mirror transistors and ensure their matching in triode region.
III. MEASUREMENT RESULTS
- The readout consumes 6.3µA from 0.6V with the CS supporting current levels from 10µA pp to 200µA pp .
- The ECG/BioZ channel crosstalk is less than -60dB in a 400Hz bandwidth.
- This sensitivity includes the both the noise of the CCIA and the CS.
- Another BioZ test with resistors of 10-200Ω shows good linearity and matching with respect to theoretical numbers.
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Citations
31 citations
21 citations
Cites background or methods from "A 0.6V 3.8μW ECG/bio-impedance moni..."
...[18], [22]–[25] since the result of the demodulated readout voltage includes several error terms coming from the odd harmonics [3]....
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...implantable devices resulted that none of the prior works has satisfied resolution and power requirement simultaneously [3], [13], [15]–[18]....
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...[13], [18], the sinusoidal output current of the current generator is applied to the test resistor of a 100 and the voltage...
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...ulation frequency for the Bio-Z measurement [1], [3], [18]....
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...In the most of prior works, this issue was typically devolved into the simple pre-demodulation technique [13], [17], [18], [22], [34] or not discussed at all [5], [16], [36], [37], leading to the degraded BW....
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13 citations
8 citations
Cites methods from "A 0.6V 3.8μW ECG/bio-impedance moni..."
..., when the EDO increased from 0 to 400 mV, the noise floor went up from 100 to 600 nV/ √ Hz in [12]....
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...Chopping-based techniques improve the CMRR of IAs effectively, including chopper-stabilized capacitively coupled IAs [5]–[12] and current-balancing IAs [13], [14]....
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5 citations
Cites background from "A 0.6V 3.8μW ECG/bio-impedance moni..."
...Although a CM cancellation path can increase the CM range, it is useful only when the CMI is smaller than the supply voltage [1,3]....
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References
12 citations
Additional excerpts
...An orthogonal frequency modulation scheme [7] enables power-efficient ECG and BioZ measurements with a single IA....
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