Design considerations for a sub-mW wireless medical body-area network receiver front end

Abstract

Wireless medical body-area networks are used to connect sensor nodes that monitor vital parameters. The radio consumes a large portion of the sensor energy budget, and hence its power dissipation should be minimized. The low-noise amplifier (LNA) is an important component of the receiver, and must guarantee low-noise amplification and impedance matching. In this work, an ultra-low-voltage ultra-low-power LNA is proposed that, thanks to the proposed transformer-based gate boosting technique, has a reduced current consumption of only 160 μA and can operate with a supply as low as 0.18 V. The LNA was designed using 40 nm Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology and features a voltage gain of 14 dB, 5.2 dB NF and -8.6 dBm IIP3. This performance is comparable to a prior work by the same authors, but with the minimum supply voltage reduced by a factor of 4x.