Key result
The proposed 1.2V 36µW reconfigurable analog front-end achieved competitive noise and sensitivity performance compared to dedicated readout ICs while occupying approximately 1.4x to 5.3x smaller chip area per channel.
The proposed reconfigurable analog front-end IC enables multi-modal cardiovascular and respiratory signal acquisition with a small chip area and low power consumption, making it highly suitable for wearable medical devices.
May enable compact multi-signal wearables; leaves open clinical validation for cardiovascular use.
This paper presents a 1.2 V 36 μW reconfigurable analog front-end (R-AFE) as a general-purpose low-cost IC for multiple-mode biomedical signals acquisition. The R-AFE efficiently reuses a reconfigurable preamplifier, a current generator (CG), and a mixed signal processing unit, having an area of 1.1 mm2 per R-AFE while supporting five acquisition modes to record different forms of cardiovascular and respiratory signals. The R-AFE can interface with voltage-, current-, impedance-, and light-sensors and hence can measure electrocardiography (ECG), bio-impedance (BioZ), photoplethysmogram (PPG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and general-purpose analog signals. Thanks to the chopper preamplifier and the low-noise CG utilizing dynamic element matching, the R-AFE mitigates 1/f noise from both the preamplifier and the CG for improved measurement sensitivity. The IC achieves competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art dedicated readout ICs of ECG, BioZ, GSR, and PPG, but with approximately 1.4×-5.3× smaller chip area per channel.
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Xu et al. (2018) studied this question. Reconfigurable Analog Front-End (R-AFE) IC vs. State-of-the-art dedicated readout ICs was evaluated. The proposed 1.2V 36µW reconfigurable analog front-end achieved competitive noise and sensitivity performance compared to dedicated readout ICs while occupying approximately 1.4x to 5.3x smaller chip area per channel.