A fully integrated power-efficient SoC with a wireless UWB transmitter for biomedical and chemical research

This paper presents a fully integrated mixed-signal microsystem designed for biomedical and electrochemical research. Our primary design objective is low power operation that enables battery powered in- or ex-vivo experiments on untethered animals. The system runs from a primary or secondary battery that can be recharged via two inductively coupled 8mm-diameter coils. The system includes a wireless ultra-wide band (UWB) transmitter with a pulse-repetition-frequency (PRF) up to 200 MHz. The system is built on a 16-bit microprocessor with an optimized instruction set and 32 kB of on-chip SRAM. The digital core consumes 350 μW at 10 MHz and is capable of running at frequencies up to 200 MHz. The core microcontroller and UWB transmitter have been fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS technology and been fully tested as stand-alone chips. The remaining blocks, including a sigma-delta analog-to-digital converter (ADC), two 10-bit digital-to-analog converters (DAC), and a sleep mode timer have been designed and extensively simulated and the SoC will be submitted for fabrication in October 2013. Measured and simulated results are presented.