Position Synchronizer Pulse Detector Input Buffer Clock Controller SPI Pulse Position Modulator FIFO Scalable

Physiological signals such as body temperature, heart rates and electrocardiogram (ECG) have been widely utilized for health monitoring applications. In order to detect the signals without cumbersome wires, heterogeneous body sensor nodes including wearable or implantable biomedical devices are wirelessly connected to each other forming a personal body sensor network (BSN) [1]. The physiological signals show different bandwidth and require various transmission rates [2]. Therefore, each sensor node needs a low power and scalable wireless transceiver running at the pertinent data rates for energy-efficient transmission. A wideband signaling transceiver for body-coupled communications (BCC) was proposed in [1] for such applications. However, since the previously reported transceiver had a fixed data rate of 2Mb/s without any modulation, it is not suitable for BSNs over the shared body channel. This paper presents a low power and scalable PHY transceiver integrated with an energy-efficient baseband processing unit. It enables packet-based data communications between the sensor nodes over the shared body channel.