A 36 μW 1.1 mm2 Reconfigurable Analog Front-End for Cardiovascular and Respiratory Signals Recording

IEEE Trans Biomed Circuits Syst. 2018 Aug;12(4):774-783. doi: 10.1109/TBCAS.2018.2814699. Epub 2018 Apr 6.

Abstract

This paper presents a 1.2 V 36 μW reconfigurable analog front-end (R-AFE) as a general-purpose low-cost IC for multiple-mode biomedical signals acquisition. The R-AFE efficiently reuses a reconfigurable preamplifier, a current generator (CG), and a mixed signal processing unit, having an area of 1.1 mm2 per R-AFE while supporting five acquisition modes to record different forms of cardiovascular and respiratory signals. The R-AFE can interface with voltage-, current-, impedance-, and light-sensors and hence can measure electrocardiography (ECG), bio-impedance (BioZ), photoplethysmogram (PPG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and general-purpose analog signals. Thanks to the chopper preamplifier and the low-noise CG utilizing dynamic element matching, the R-AFE mitigates ${\text{1}}\text{/}f$ noise from both the preamplifier and the CG for improved measurement sensitivity. The IC achieves competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art dedicated readout ICs of ECG, BioZ, GSR, and PPG, but with approximately 1.4×-5.3× smaller chip area per channel.

MeSH terms

  • Amplifiers, Electronic
  • Cardiovascular Diseases / diagnosis*
  • Cardiovascular Diseases / physiopathology
  • Electrocardiography / methods
  • Equipment Design
  • Humans
  • Photoplethysmography / methods
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted