Radio frequency

RMO4A-5
A 2mW 400MHz RF Transceiver SoC in 0.18um CMOS Technology for Wireless Medical Applications
M.R. Nezhad-Ahmadi1, G. Weale1, A. El-Agha1, D. Griesdorf1, G. Tumbush2, A.Hollinger3,M.Matthey3,H.Meiners3, S. Asgaran1
1

AMI Semiconductor Waterloo, ON, Canada 2 Colorado, USA 3 Marin, Switzerland

Abstract — An ultra low power 400MHz 128kbps-FSK RF transceiver SoC which consumes less than 2mA from a 1V supply was implemented in a 0.18µm CMOS technology for wireless medical applications and applied to a wireless hearing aid communication system, a new generation of hearing aid device. The transceiver was implemented fully differentially and directly matched to a non-50ohm miniaturized dipole antenna. The receiver sensitivity of -93dBm (BER=10-3) was measured for 128Kbps data rate. The transceiver architecture has the ability of selection of image band in receive mode and transmitting in the image band in transmit mode. The whole RF transceiver including digital modulator and demodulator occupies a die area of less than 2.6mm2. Index Terms — CMOS, transceiver, ultra low power, direct matching.

hearing aid to hearing aid and a remote device to hearing aid communication. Section II is a discussion of the low power transceiver architecture. Section III describes the main circuit blocks of the transceiver. Section IV presents measurement and test results while conclusions are given in section V. II. TRANSCEIVER ARCHITECTURE
Mixer Band Control

Band Select Switch

LNA Mixer

Demodulator/ Clock Recovery

Polyphase Filter/Image rejection

BPF Lim iting Amplifier

Baseband Encoder/Decoder

Band Control

I. INTRODUCTION The need for ultra low power and compact radios for medical and related products is growing rapidly. The requirements in this market for low voltage (battery operated), ultra low current (long life), miniaturized antenna and RF performance push the bounds of current technologies and existing solutions that maybe applicable to