An ultra low power digital receiver architecture for biomedical applications

The emerging biomedical applications urge ultra low power consumption and small size transceivers. In this paper traditional modulations schemes have been studied and compared to a novel modulation scheme called Saturated Analog Signal (SAS), which has been developed specifically for these new applications. This new modulation has been combined with a new design for the receiver in 65nm technology and resulted in a digital CMOS receiver with 10 μW power consumption. The receiver achieved a 500 Kb/s data rate, giving it a 20pJ/bit received consumption. This design uses a 1 V power supply while occupying an area of just 0.6 mm² and is capable of being fully integrated on single chip solutions for ultra low power biomedical applications such as retinal prosthesis and embedded neural applications.