A Sub-100-μW 0.1-to-27-Mb/s Pulse-Based Digital Transmitter for the Human Intranet in 28-nm FD-SOI CMOS

Human body communications require energy-efficient transceivers to connect diverse devices on the human body for wellness and medical applications. This article presents a fully digital pulse-based transmitter (TX) for capacitive body-coupled communications (c-BCCs) in 28-nm Fully Depleted Silicon on Insulator (FD-SOI) CMOS. The TX is operating at 450 MHz where surface-wave (SW) propagation is the dominant mechanism of c-BCC, offering a larger bandwidth with a more stable channel. The heavily duty-cycled TX uses a 90-MHz free-running oscillator and edge combiners to generate OOK Gaussian-shaped pulses through a switched-capacitor power amplifier (PA). Wide range forward body biasing (FBB), specific to FD-SOI technology, allows frequency tuning and adaptive efficiency optimization as a function of data rate. The proposed TX consumes 17–76
$\mu \text{W}$
for flexible data rates from 0.1 to 27 Mb/s (170 down to 2.8 pJ/b) with up to 14% system efficiency under 0.5-V supply voltage.