A LOW-NOISE LOW-POWER FRONT-END AMPLIFIER FOR NEURAL-RECORDING APPLICATIONS

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (04) ◽  
pp. 301-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Hossein Zarifi ◽  
Javad Frounchi ◽  
Mohammad A. Tinati ◽  
Shahin Farshchi ◽  
Jack W. Judy

Monitoring the electrical activities of a large number of neurons in vertebrates' central nervous system in vivo through hundreds of parallel channels without interferring in their natural functions is a neuroscientist's interest. Value of this information in both scientific and clinical contexts, especially in expansion of brain–computer interfaces, is extremely significant. Therefore, low-noise amplifiers are needed with filtering capability on the front end to amplify the desired signals and eliminate direct current baseline shifts. Hence, size and power consumption need to be minimized to reduce trauma and heat dissipation, which can result in tissue damage for human applications and the system needs to be implantable and wireless. The practical solution for developing such systems is system-on-a-chip, based on ultra-low-power mixed-mode and wideband RFIC designs. They, however, impose a number of challenges that may require nontraditional solutions. In this paper, we present a fully differential low-power low-noise preamplifier suitable for recording biological signals, from a few mHz up to 10 kHz. This amplifier has a bandpass filter that is tunable between 10 mHz and 10 kHz, and has been designed and simulated in a standard 90-nm CMOS process. The circuit consumes 10 μW from a 1.2 V supply and provides a gain of 40 dB and an output swing of ±0.5 V with a total harmonic distortion of less than 0.5%. The total input-referred noise level is 4.6 μV integrating the noise over 0.01 Hz to 10 kHz.

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1760
Author(s):  
Folla Kamdem Jérôme ◽  
Wembe Tafo Evariste ◽  
Essimbi Zobo Bernard ◽  
Maria Liz Crespo ◽  
Andres Cicuttin ◽  
...  

The front-end electronics (FEE) of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is needed very low power consumption and higher readout bandwidth to match the low power requirement of its Short Strip application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) (SSA) and to handle a large number of pileup events in the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A low-noise, wide bandwidth, and ultra-low power FEE for the pixel-strip sensor of the CMS has been designed and simulated in a 0.35 µm Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) process. The design comprises a Charge Sensitive Amplifier (CSA) and a fast Capacitor-Resistor-Resistor-Capacitor (CR-RC) pulse shaper (PS). A compact structure of the CSA circuit has been analyzed and designed for high throughput purposes. Analytical calculations were performed to achieve at least 998 MHz gain bandwidth, and then overcome pileup issue in the High-Luminosity LHC. The spice simulations prove that the circuit can achieve 88 dB dc-gain while exhibiting up to 1 GHz gain-bandwidth product (GBP). The stability of the design was guaranteed with an 82-degree phase margin while 214 ns optimal shaping time was extracted for low-power purposes. The robustness of the design against radiations was performed and the amplitude resolution of the proposed front-end was controlled at 1.87% FWHM (full width half maximum). The circuit has been designed to handle up to 280 fC input charge pulses with 2 pF maximum sensor capacitance. In good agreement with the analytical calculations, simulations outcomes were validated by post-layout simulations results, which provided a baseline gain of 546.56 mV/MeV and 920.66 mV/MeV, respectively, for the CSA and the shaping module while the ENC (Equivalent Noise Charge) of the device was controlled at 37.6 e− at 0 pF with a noise slope of 16.32 e−/pF. Moreover, the proposed circuit dissipates very low power which is only 8.72 µW from a 3.3 V supply and the compact layout occupied just 0.0205 mm2 die area.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Chrisben Gladson ◽  
Adith Hari Narayana ◽  
V. Thenmozhi ◽  
M. Bhaskar

AbstractDue to the increased processing data rates, which is required in applications such as fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks, the battery power will discharge rapidly. Hence, there is a need for the design of novel circuit topologies to cater the demand of ultra-low voltage and low power operation. In this paper, a low-noise amplifier (LNA) operating at ultra-low voltage is proposed to address the demands of battery-powered communication devices. The LNA dual shunt peaking and has two modes of operation. In low-power mode (Mode-I), the LNA achieves a high gain ($$S21$$ S 21 ) of 18.87 dB, minimum noise figure ($${NF}_{min.}$$ NF m i n . ) of 2.5 dB in the − 3 dB frequency range of 2.3–2.9 GHz, and third-order intercept point (IIP3) of − 7.9dBm when operating at 0.6 V supply. In high-power mode (Mode-II), the achieved gain, NF, and IIP3 are 21.36 dB, 2.3 dB, and 13.78dBm respectively when operating at 1 V supply. The proposed LNA is implemented in UMC 180 nm CMOS process technology with a core area of $$0.40{\mathrm{ mm}}^{2}$$ 0.40 mm 2 and the post-layout validation is performed using Cadence SpectreRF circuit simulator.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avish Kosari ◽  
Jacob Breiholz ◽  
NingXi Liu ◽  
Benton Calhoun ◽  
David Wentzloff

This paper presents a power efficient analog front-end (AFE) for electrocardiogram (ECG) signal monitoring and arrhythmia diagnosis. The AFE uses low-noise and low-power circuit design methodologies and aggressive voltage scaling to satisfy both the low power consumption and low input-referred noise requirements of ECG signal acquisition systems. The AFE was realized with a three-stage fully differential AC-coupled amplifier, and it provides bio-signal acquisition with programmable gain and bandwidth. The AFE was implemented in a 130 nm CMOS process, and it has a measured tunable mid-band gain from 31 to 52 dB with tunable low-pass and high-pass corner frequencies. Under only 0.5 V supply voltage, it consumes 68 nW of power with an input-referred noise of 2.8 µVrms and a power efficiency factor (PEF) of 3.9, which makes it very suitable for energy-harvesting applications. The low-noise 68nW AFE was also integrated on a self-powered physiological monitoring System on Chip (SoC) that is used to capture ECG bio-signals. Heart rate extraction (R-R) detection algorithms were implemented and utilized to analyze the ECG data received by the AFE, showing the feasibility of <100 nW AFE for continuous ECG monitoring applications.


Author(s):  
Bob Yintat Ma ◽  
Jonathan B. Hacker ◽  
Joshua Bergman ◽  
Peter Chen ◽  
Gerard Sullivan ◽  
...  

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (24) ◽  
pp. 8476
Author(s):  
Yuxuan Tang ◽  
Yulang Feng ◽  
He Hu ◽  
Cheng Fang ◽  
Hao Deng ◽  
...  

This paper presents a wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA) front-end with noise and distortion cancellation for high-frequency ultrasound transducers. The LNA employs a resistive shunt-feedback structure with a feedforward noise-canceling technique to accomplish both wideband impedance matching and low noise performance. A complementary CMOS topology was also developed to cancel out the second-order harmonic distortion and enhance the amplifier linearity. A high-frequency ultrasound (HFUS) and photoacoustic (PA) imaging front-end, including the proposed LNA and a variable gain amplifier (VGA), was designed and fabricated in a 180 nm CMOS process. At 80 MHz, the front-end achieves an input-referred noise density of 1.36 nV/sqrt (Hz), an input return loss (S11) of better than −16 dB, a voltage gain of 37 dB, and a total harmonic distortion (THD) of −55 dBc while dissipating a power of 37 mW, leading to a noise efficiency factor (NEF) of 2.66.


2016 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 178-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirin Montazeri ◽  
Wei-Ting Wong ◽  
Ahmet H. Coskun ◽  
Joseph C. Bardin

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