A low-power wireless nano-potentiostat for biomedical applications with ISO 18000-3 interface in 0.35 μm CMOS

This article presents a new configurable wireless sensor system that can be used for biochemical and biomedical measurements, e.g. for monitoring the glucose level in blood. The sensor systems consists of an integrated nano-potentiostat which performs the actual measurements and an ISO 18000-3 compliant transponder module which allows wireless telemetric data transmission and also powers the whole sensor system. The two-chip sensor system was implemented in a 0.35 μm CMOS technology. The architecture and implementation details of both ASICs are presented in this article. A demonstrator system has been manufactured in combination with a chronoamperometric glucose sensor which allows the measurement of the glucose level in tear fluid. For a range of sensor currents from 0.1 μA to 10 μA the potentiostat achieved an accuracy of more than 5 % at a total power dissipation of less than 600 μW. With the realized antenna geometry a wireless communication distance of more than 7 cm has been achieved.