Electro-textiles for Body Worn Integrated Silicon Solutions

The integration of single chip wireless transceiver and electro-textile antennas enables a novel diversity wearable antenna system that can optimize a wireless communication link. Compared to current diversity schemes on small form factor handheld platforms, the on clothing diversity gives significant reception advantages. The details of system implementation are discussed with an overview of state-of-art system-on-chip (SOC) and system-on-package (SOP) solutions. The limitations of current integrated/embedded antennas are addressed with the comparison of electro-textile wearable antennas. Both increased efficiency of the body-worn antennas and significant diversity gains are demonstrated to increase the received signal on a commercial platform. Through an indoor WLAN reception measurement, we demonstrate how diversity gain can be improved through body-worn antenna system as compared to current embedded solutions