An Ultra Low Power Baseband Transceiver IC for Wireless Body Area Network in 0.18- $\mu$ m CMOS Technology

This paper investigates the efficient design of the PHY layer architecture for wireless body area networks (WBAN), which targets on ultra-low power consumption with reliable quality of service (QoS). A low cost baseband transceiver specification and a data processing flow are proposed with a comparatively low-complexity control state machine. A multifunctional digital timing synchronization scheme is also proposed, which can achieve packet synchronization and data recovery. The proposed baseband transceiver is fabricated in an 0.18- μm CMOS process. With a 1.1 V supply and 4 MHz system clock, this baseband chip only consumes 34 μW in transmitter (TX) mode and 39.6 μW in receiver (RX) mode. To demonstrate and to optimize the reliability of the proposed design, the dedicated bit-error-rate and packet-error-rate analysis is reported.