Human-Body Communication ASIC: A Decision Feedback Equalisation-based Body-Channel Communication Transceiver

Abstract

Body-channel communication (BCC) refers to the exploitation of the human body as a signal-transmission medium for digital data communication. BCC is expected to play important roles in the forthcoming era of internet-of-everything (IoE). This thesis work presents deep research insights of a newly proposed BCC transceiver: motivations and objectives of the research work; measurement and experimental procedures; transceiver design; and transceiver implementation. The proposed BCC transceiver exploits capacitively-coupled digital baseband communication with an analogue equalisation at the receiver. The transceiver consists of a simple voltage-mode inverter-based source-series terminated (SST) driver; and a full-rate, resistively-loaded, current-summing, 8-tap decision feedback equaliser. The transceiver, fabricated in 65 nm CMOS process, achieves the data rates (and corresponding energy efficiency) of 150 Mb/s (16.6 pJ/b); and 100 Mb/s (23.5 pJ/b) over clearly defined human-body communication (HBC) channels of 20 cm and 1.3 m distances on the human limb, respectively. For both modes of operation, the minimum achievable BER was 10-6. The fabricated transceiver occupies a total core area of 5580 μm2, which is less than 1% compared to any previously-presented work. The remarkable performance enhancement with superior area efficiency verifies the proposed work’s excellence. The implementation results show that the DFE technique, which is exploited for the first time, could be the key enabler of a BCC transceiver that operates at several hundreds of megabits per second for many innovative body-area network applications.