Concurrent Body-Coupled Powering and Communication ICs With a Single Electrode

Abstract

Body-coupled powering (BCP) and body-coupled communication (BCC) utilize the human body channel as the wireless transmission medium, which shows less path loss around the body area. However, integrating both BCP and BCC requires multiple electrodes or alternating the uplink and downlink in the time domain, due to signal interferences and backflow between different paths. To address this issue, we propose a base station (BS) IC and a sensor node (SN) IC with BCP and BCC concurrency. At the BS, the adaptive self-interference cancellation (SI-C) structure suppresses the output signals that are coupled at the data receiver, enabling the concurrent uplink data recovery and downlink power delivery. At the SN, the ground domain of the uplink data path is separated from that of the downlink power/data path to suppress leakage between the paths. For regulated power supply in different ground domains, the cross-ground-domain power converter is designed with 89.1% efficiency. The ICs are implemented in a 40-nm 1P8M standard CMOS process, and BCC + BCP concurrent operations are successfully validated.