A Driver Circuit for Body-Coupled Communication

Sammanfattning: The main concept of Body-Coupled Communication (BCC) is to transmit the electrical information through the human body as a communication medium by means of capacitive coupling. Nowadays the current research of wireless body area network are expanding more with the new ideas and topologies for better result in respect to the low power and area, security, reliability and sensitivity since it is first introduced by the Zimmerman in 1995. In contrast with the other existing wireless communication technology such as WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee, the BCC is going to increase the number of applications as well as solves the problem with the cell based communication system depending upon the frequency allocation. In addition, this promising technology has been standardized by a task group named IEEE 802.15.6 addressing a reliable and feasible system for low power in-body and on-body nodes that serves a variety of medical and non medical applications. The entire BAN project is divided into three major parts consisting of application layer, digital baseband and analog front end (AFE) transceiver. In the thesis work a strong driver circuit for BCC is implemented as an analog front end transmitter (Tx). The primary purpose of the study is to transmit a strong signal as the signal is attenuated by the body around 60 dB. The Driver circuit is cascaded of two single-stage inverter and an identical inverter with drain resistor. The entire driver circuit is designed with ST65 nm CMOS technology with 1.2 V supply operated at 10 MHz frequency, has a driving capability of 6 mA which is the basic requirement. The performance of the transmitter is compared with the other architecture by integrating different analysis such as corner analysis, noise analysis and eye diagram. The cycle to cycle jitter is 0.87% which is well below to the maximum point and the power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) is 65 dB indicates the good emission of supply noise. In addition, the transmitter does not require a filter to emit the noise because the body acts like a low pass filter. In conclusion the findings of the thesis work is quite healthy compared to the previous work. Finally, there is some point to improve for the driver circuit in respect to the power consumption, propagation delay and leakage power in the future.