A 100Mb/s Galvanically-Coupled Body-Channel-Communication Transceiver with 4.75pJ/b TX and 26.8 pJ/b RX for Bionic Arms

Abstract

A galvanically-coupled body-channel communication (GCBCC) transceiver (TRX) is proposed for bionic arms, offering robust communication and human-body safety. The GC-BCC mitigates the influence from the environmental changes and disturbances. A simple termination at the RX input widens the channel bandwidth (BW), enabling 100Mb/s communication. The implantable TX guarantees the user’s safety by employing a current-regulating channel driver, a charge-balancing scheme, and a biphasic waveform generated by bipolar RZ (BRZ) encoding. The TRX IC fabricated in 0.18 mm CMOS, achieves a low bit-error rate (BER) of 10-9 with excellent TX and RX energy efficiencies of 4.75pJ/b and 26.8pJ/b, respectively.