An ultra low-power and area-efficient baseband processor for WBAN transmitter

The IEEE 802.15.6-2012 standard optimized for short-range/low power purpose for WBAN applications has been approved recently. Based on the standard, this paper proposes the hardware implementation of the baseband transmitter for the first time. In our design, the physical layer (PHY) employs narrowband(NB) PHY in the standard and DPSK Modulator is optimized by employing CSD-coded (canonical signed digit) filters for low power and area-efficiency consideration. Clock gating is also implemented to cut the dynamic power in the idle state. Implemented in 130nm CMOS technology, the least total power dissipation of the transmitter is only 69.5uW at 151.8kbps and 1.0V supply in the Medical Implant Communication Service (MICS) band. In addition, The power consumption of the PHY module under different frequency bands and different data rates is investigated. The minimum energy-per-bit is only 10.1pJ/bit at 971.4kbps indicating that our PHY module is more energy-efficient than previous works.