A biopotential acquisition chip from IMEC and its Netherland partner Holst Centre has been singled out for praise at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.
"There has been a growing interest in wearable biopotential-monitoring systems, which have very strict requirements in terms of power dissipation, high signal quality, small area and robust operation during ambulatory use," said the ISSCC. This chip has the "first analogue motion artifact suppression technique that does not degrade the performance of an analogue front-end".
The 3-channel chip consumes 192?W from a 1.2V supply (160?A) and is capable of rail-to-rail DC offset rejection for suppressing motion artifacts, while achieving 120dB CMRR (common-mode rejection), 1G? input impedance, and 1.3?Vrms input-referred noise at 100Hz bandwidth.
Made on 0.18?m CMOS, the chip measures 8x5mm.
"The biopotential acquisition asic improves the quality of recording in portable biopotential monitoring systems, particularly in ECG [electrocardiography], said the ISSCC.
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The IEEE holds the International Solid-State Circuits Conference once a year in San Francisco. |
Including the acquisition chip, IMEC and Holst are presenting 14 papers at ISSCC 2012.
Amongst these are descriptions of three successive approximation ADCs for reconfigurable radios: A 1.7mW 11bit 250Msample/s 2x interleaved pipelined ADC in 40nm CMOS, a 70dB 10bit 0-80Msample/s current-Integrating ADC with adaptive dynamic ranging, and a 7-10bit 0-4Msample/s ADC with 6.5-16fJ/conversion-step.
Addressing thin-film transistors made from unusual semiconductors, IMEC has papers on: 1D and 2D 1.5kHz air-stable organic analogue capacitive touch sensors on plastic foil, a hybrid (organic + solution-processed metal-oxide) bidirectional RFID tag, and a 6bit 10Msample/s current-steering DAC made with amorphous GaInZn oxide thin-film transistors, achieving a spurious free dynamic range of over 30dB up to 300kHz.
There is also a 60GHz transceiver chip in 40nm digital low-power CMOS, "obtaining sufficient error vector management [EVM -17dB at 7Gbit/s] for modulations as complex as QAM16 in the four channels specified by IEEE802.15.3c", said ISSCC.
