An energy-efficient OFDM-based baseband transceiver design for ubiquitous healthcare monitoring applications

This work proposes an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based baseband transceiver design for wireless body area network (WBAN) application. Based on the analysis of the WBAN operation behavior, high transmission data rate and low power implementation techniques are proposed to reduce the transmission energy. An electrocardiography (ECG) transmission platform is also established with proposed design for system evaluation. This chip is implemented in a 90nm CMOS technology with the core size of 2.85 mm², and this baseband transceiver dissipates 357.14 uW with supply voltage 0.5 V. The proposed chip provides maximum 9.7 Mbps data rate, resulting in active duty cycle of 0.1763% and the transmission energy of 0.37 nJ/bit.