Low-power MEMS pressure sensor for wireless biomedical applications

Reducing power consumption leads to improve wireless sensor autonomy, increase battery life, and reduce radiated power. State-of-the-art blood pressure sensors based on piezoresistive transducers in a full Wheatstone bridge configuration uses low ohmic values because high sensitivity and low noise approach. In this work, the piezoresistance values are increased in order to reduce one order of magnitude the power consumption. The noise introduced by this improvement was proved that does not limit the accuracy for 8-bit applications. Therefore, a low power consumption pressure sensor with high sensitivity and low noise is proposed. Power consumption versus sensitivity tradeoff is analyzed in detail.