Session 7 — Advances in biomedial sensor systems

For Biomedical sensor systems, there are always a lot of challenges in four major areas, namely the design of the bio-sensors itself, the power management of the implantable devices, the communication with these devices and the signal processing within these devices. In this session, the first paper describes a large (512×576) CMOS ISFET sensor realized in 65nm CMOS technology targeted towards DNA sequencing. It achieves high readout gain (201 mV/ph) and fast readout speed (375 fps). To address the challenges in the power management of implants, a voltage doubling rectifier and regulator combined circuit is described in the second paper. Power conversion efficiency and voltage conversion efficiency are improved by utilizing the voltage regulation transistor also as a passive rectifier. To efficiently utilize the communication bandwidth as well as power available in the implants, compressed-sensing is a hot topic in the biomedical area. The third paper describes a signal processing technique that compresses and also extracts key statistics of the input signal at sampling time. With these statistics, the reconstruction of the signal can be significantly improved (9-18dB) at the receiver. The fourth paper describes a fully-integrated, full-duplex wireless transceiver to address the challenges for high rate data communication (100 Mbps downlink and 500 Mbps uplink) required in some implantable devices. Physical size requirement is reduced by avoiding the use of circulators/diplexers with the antenna for RX and TX being shared.