Design of a power-efficient wireless body-area network system : receive side

Abstract

The wireless body area network (WBAN) has gained significant attention over the past few decades due to its ability to offer seamless and real-time healthcare and fitness monitoring, allowing patients to go about their daily activities without any constraints.

Designing high radiation efficiency antennas for wearable devices presents a challenge due to the close proximity to the human body, which causes loading effects due to the lossy nature of body tissues. Additionally, the demand for lightweight, low-cost, maintenance-free, and easy-to-install antennas further complicates the design process.

Firstly, a compact QMSIW antenna with a proposed bandwidth enhancement technique is presented, and this technique broaden the bandwidth by 108% as compared to conventional SIW structure. The measured on/off-body channel with the designed antenna provides usable experimental data for link budget estimation in transceiver system design.

Secondly, a new zero-IF PTRX that incorporates a passive four-stage cascading double balanced sub-harmonic mixer for phase detection is proposed. This architecture can effectively address the phase-pulling issue resulting from interference and on-chip coupling, and meanwhile minimize the power consumption of the VCO. Additionally, a 4-stage differential ring oscillator with 8 phases for sub-harmonic operation and a low-power inductor-less low noise amplifier (LNA) are incorporated to minimize the active die area.

Date of Award	2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Supervisor	George Jie YUAN (Supervisor)