CAREER: Low-Power Transceiver Design Methods for Wireless Medical Monitoring

摘要题目：无线医疗监测的低功耗收发器设计方法为了使众多电池供电的便携式和植入式生物信号测量设备实现更广泛的无线连接，需要低功耗的无线通信芯片。然而，功耗的降低会导致性能和可靠性的下降，这阻碍了低功耗电路设计方法的采用。在医疗应用、无线传感器网络和具有能量收集功能的芯片中，需要创新的集成电路设计技术来减轻这种权衡。该项目的主要研究目标是通过整合高效的数字电路，为可调谐低功耗模拟电路的性能和可靠性增强创造设计方法。一个关键的教育目标是开拓一种统一的方法，通过这种方法，学生协作学习将低功耗模拟集成电路设计和数字辅助性能调整方法结合起来，主要关注尖端医疗应用。新的课程材料将建立一个长期的研究和教育计划，旨在为各种小型化设备创造可靠的无线能力。本科生和高中实习生将直接参与研究任务。该项目团队将与东北大学STEM教育中心合作，组织与K-12学生和教师的校园活动，以及与当地学校中代表性不足的群体建立联系的外展访问。目前最先进的低功率接收器由于其动态范围有限，容易受到干扰，当多个无线医疗监测设备彼此靠近共存时，这种干扰尤为严重。为了克服这一挑战，将设计一种自适应设计方法，通过在接收机路径中进行额外滤波来增强干扰抑制。这项研究工作将解决低功耗集成电路的性能缺陷，从而使更广泛的设备可以配备短距离无线连接。它将通过在RF前端引入自适应滤波，为低功耗模拟电路提供数字辅助线性改进以及用于自校准的数字频谱分析，为设计具有更好抗干扰性的收发器提供新知识。新颖的电路级线性化方法将被证明能够设计模拟电路，其中包括在亚阈值区域内工作的晶体管，其动态范围大大提高。与现有收发器相比，这些方法将以不到六分之一的功率实现领先的性能。该研究将产生评估模拟电路增益和线性特性的技术，使用高效的快速傅立叶变换引擎，计算信号的频谱，比现有方法的芯片面积要小得多。这将成为新的内置测试和校准策略的基础，以抵消先进芯片制造技术不断上升的工艺变化。

Proposal Number: 1451213Abstract Title: Low-Power Transceiver Design Methods for Wireless Medical Monitoring Wireless communication chips with lower power consumption are needed to enable more widespread wireless connectivity for numerous battery-powered portable and implantable biosignal measurement devices. However, reduced power consumptions lead to degraded performance and reliability, which inhibits the adoption of low-power circuit design approaches. Innovative integrated circuit design techniques are required to alleviate this tradeoff in medical applications, wireless sensor networks and chips with energy harvesting features. The primary research objective of this project is to create design methodologies for performance and reliability enhancements of tunable low-power analog circuits through the incorporation of efficient digital circuits. A key educational goal is to pioneer a unified approach through which students collaboratively learn to combine low-power analog integrated circuit design and digitally assisted performance tuning methods with a primary focus on cutting-edge medical applications. New course materials will establish a long-lasting research and education program aimed at creating reliable wireless capabilities for various miniaturized devices. Undergraduates and high school interns will be directly involved in research tasks. The project team will collaborate with Northeastern University's Center for STEM Education to organize on-campus activities with K-12 students and teachers as well as outreach visits to connect with underrepresented groups in local schools. State-of-the-art low-power receivers are prone to interference due to their limited dynamic ranges, which is particularly severe when multiple wireless medical monitoring devices coexist in close proximity to each other. To overcome this challenge, an adaptive design methodology will be devised to enhance interference suppression through extra filtering in the receiver path. This research effort will address the performance deficiencies of low-power integrated circuits such that a broader range of devices can be equipped with short-range wireless connectivity. It will provide new knowledge to design transceivers with better immunity to interference through the introduction of adaptive filtering in RF front-ends, digitally assisted linearity improvements for low-power analog circuits, and digital spectrum analysis for self-calibrations. Novel circuit-level linearization methods will be demonstrated to enable the design of analog circuits that include transistors operating in the subthreshold region with substantially improved dynamic ranges. These methods will be leveraged to achieve leading-edge performance with less than one-sixth of the power compared to current transceivers. The research will produce techniques to evaluate gain and linearity characteristics of analog circuits using an efficient fast Fourier transform engine that calculates the frequency spectrum of signals with significantly less chip area than existing methods. This will be a foundation for new built-in test and calibration strategies that counteract rising process variations of advanced chip manufacturing technologies.