A 79pJ/b 80Mb/s full-duplex transceiver and a 42.5μW 100kb/s super-regenerative transceiver for body channel communication

Abstract

Recently, smart phones or head-mounted displays enables high definition (HD) video streaming and image data to be shared with friends while wearable smart sensors continuously monitor and send user's physiological information to a smart watch. Body channel communication (BCC), which uses the human body as the communication channel [1], has demonstrated better human-friendly interface and energy-efficient performance compared with air channel communication. However, most of the previous BCC research used only the frequency band below 100MHz and were only focused on either low data rate (<10Mb/s) healthcare applications [2-5] or high data rate (60Mb/s) multimedia data transfer [6]. Its available channel bandwidth was limited < 100MHz and the interference from FM radio due to body antenna effect had a significant effect on its performance. Moreover, [6] did not support full duplex communication so that the user interaction with wearable devices was not possible in live video streaming or real-time VR game applications.