A 2m-Range 711µW Body Channel Communication Transceiver Featuring Dynamically-Sampling Bias-Free Interface Front End.

Body Channel Communication (BCC) utilizes the body surface as a low-loss signal transmission medium, reducing the power consumption of wireless wearable devices. However, the effective communication range on the human body is limited in the state-of-the-art BCC transceivers, where the signal loss between the body surface and the BCC receiver remains one of the main bottlenecks. To reduce the interface loss, a high input impedance is desired by the BCC receiver, but the DC-biasing circuits decrease the input impedance. In this work, a dynamically-sampling IFE is proposed to eliminate the DC voltage bias, resulting in a 90kΩ high input impedance and a 94dB RF-IF conversion gain to reduce the interface loss in long-range BCC applications. The BCC transceiver chip is fabricated in 55nm CMOS process, taking a die area of 0.123mm2. Measured results show that the chip extends the BCC range to 2m for both the forward and backward paths, where the transmitter and receiver consume 711µW power in total.

Closed-Loop Characterization of Noise and Stability in a Mode-Localized Resonant MEMS Sensor.

This paper presents results from the closed-loop characterization of an electrically coupled mode-localized sensor topology including measurements of amplitude ratios over a long duration, stability, noise floor, and the bandwidth of operation. The sensitivity of the prototype sensor is estimated to be -5250 in the linear operation regime. An input-referred stability of 84 ppb with respect to normalized stiffness perturbations is achieved at 500 s. When compared to frequency shift sensing within the same device, amplitude ratio sensing provides higher resolution for long-term measurements due to the intrinsic common-mode rejection properties of a mode-localized system. A theoretical framework is established to quantify noise floor associated with measurements validated through numerical simulations and experimental data. In addition, the operating bandwidth of the sensor is found to be 3.5 Hz for 3-dB flatness.

Twenty-Eight Orders of Parametric Resonance in a Microelectromechanical Device for Multi-band Vibration Energy Harvesting.

This paper contends to be the first to report the experimental observation of up to 28 orders of parametric resonance, which has thus far only been envisioned in the theoretical realm. While theory has long predicted the onset of n orders of parametric resonance, previously reported experimental observations have been limited up to about the first 5 orders. This is due to the rapid narrowing nature of the frequency bandwidth of the higher instability intervals, making practical accessibility increasingly more difficult. Here, the authors have experimentally confirmed up to 28 orders of parametric resonance in a micromachined membrane resonator when electrically undamped. While the implication of this finding spans across the vibration dynamics and transducer application spectrum, the particular significance of this work is to broaden the accumulative operational frequency bandwidth of vibration energy harvesting for enabling self-powered microsystems. Up to 5 orders were recorded when driven at 1.0 g of acceleration across a matched load of 70 kΩ. With a natural frequency of 980 Hz, the fundamental mode direct resonance had a -3 dB bandwidth of 55 Hz, in contrast to the 314 Hz for the first order parametric resonance; furthermore, the half power bands of all 5 orders accumulated to 478 Hz.