A Millimeter-Scale Crystal-Less MICS Transceiver for Insertable Smart Pills

IEEE Trans Biomed Circuits Syst. 2020 Dec;14(6):1218-1229. doi: 10.1109/TBCAS.2020.3036905. Epub 2020 Dec 31.

Abstract

This paper presents a millimeter-scale crystal-less wireless transceiver for volume-constrained insertable pills. Operating in the 402-405 MHz medical implant communication service (MICS) band, the phase-tracking receiver-based over-the-air carrier recovery has a ±160 ppm coverage. A fully integrated adaptive antenna impedance matching solution is proposed to calibrate the antenna impedance variation inside the body. A tunable matching network (TMN) with single inductor performs impedance matching for both transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) and TX/RX mode switching. To dynamically calibrate the antenna impedance variation over different locations and diet conditions, a loop-back power detector using self-mixing is adopted, which expands the power contour up to 4.8 VSWR. The transceiver is implemented in a 40-nm CMOS technology, occupying 2 mm2 die area. The transceiver chip and a miniature antenna are integrated in a 3.5 × 15 mm2 area prototype wireless module. It has a receiver sensitivity of -90 dBm at 200 kbps data rate and delivers up to - 25 dBm EIRP in the wireless measurement with a liquid phantom.

MeSH terms

  • Electronics, Medical / instrumentation*
  • Equipment Design
  • Gastroscopy / instrumentation*
  • Humans
  • Models, Biological
  • Phantoms, Imaging
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / instrumentation
  • Stomach / diagnostic imaging
  • Wireless Technology / instrumentation*