A Flexible End-to-End Dual ASIC Transceiver for OFDM Ultrasound In-Body Communication

Implanted medical devices need a reliable, low-energy and secure in-body communication link. Ultrasound (US) wave propagation is promising over other techniques due to its lower body attenuation, inherent security and well-studied physiological impact. While US communication systems have been propos...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2022 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference (BioCAS) pp. 21 - 25
Main Authors Bos, Thomas, Verhelst, Marian, Dehaene, Wim
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 13.10.2022
Subjects
ASIC transceiver
Attenuation
intra-body communication
low energy
Modulation
multi-chip integration
OFDM modulation
RISC-V
Semiconductor device measurement
Throughput
Transducers
Transmitters
ultrasonic
Ultrasonic imaging
wireless body area network
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DOI10.1109/BioCAS54905.2022.9948567

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Summary:Implanted medical devices need a reliable, low-energy and secure in-body communication link. Ultrasound (US) wave propagation is promising over other techniques due to its lower body attenuation, inherent security and well-studied physiological impact. While US communication systems have been proposed, they either neglect realistic channel conditions or fail to be integrated into small-scale, energy-scarce systems. This paper presents a highly flexible end-to-end ASIC transceiver with OFDM modulation tailored to robust intra-body US communication. This transceiver comprises a dual chip solution: i) a RISC-V microcontroller extended with two custom passband modulation accelerators implemented in 65nm CMOS; and ii) an analog front-end containing a 20V class-D power amplifier and low-power receive chain implemented in 180nm BCD. Under typical 10cm in-body channel attenuation, OFDM-16QAM modulation and 470kbps datarate, the transceiver achieves both in Tx and Rx mode a BER below 1e-4 consuming 64/20.9nJ/bit Tx/Rx.
DOI:10.1109/BioCAS54905.2022.9948567