Performance evaluation on FPGA-implemented UWB-IR receiver for in-body to out-of-body communication systems

In order to design an optimized transceiver structure of ultra wideband (UWB) transmission in in-body to out-of-body communications, it is necessary to make the transceiver structure be easily adjustable in order to realize a good communication performance in an experimental environment. For this purpose, we first implement our develop UWB-impulse radio (IR) receiver structure for the in-body to out-of-body communication in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) board, and evaluate the fundamental communication performance of the FPGA-implemented UWB-IR receiver by a biological-equivalent liquid phantom experiment. The FPGA configuration results indicate that our FPGA realization of the UWB-IR receiver has accomplished good communication performance with few FPGA slices. Moreover, the evaluation results in the liquid phantom experiment show that the FPGA-implemented UWB-IR receiver can achieve a bit error rate (BER) of 10^-3 up to a communication distance of 70 mm with ensuring a high data rate of 2 Mbps.