Low Energy On-Body Communication for BSN

Semiconductor System Lab, Dept. of EE, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea [email protected] Abstract—Low power on-body communication is introduced. The human body surface is examined for the communication channel and 10KHz-100MHz frequency band, ‘bodywire’, is found to be effective in the wireless on-body communication. DCI is proposed to avoid any intentional ground electrode for the capacitive coupling. A CMOS transceiver chip for the on-body communication is fabricated and can achieve 2Mbps with 0.2mW power consumption. The architecture of the BSN controller is proposed and fabricated with CMOS. It has a 16b RISC and a schedule director with TCAM. It can separately control 254 sensor nodes and consumes 14uW in normal mode and 160uW in alert mode including leakage current. The fabricated chip is used to transmit MP3 data from the finger tip to the earphone to enjoy the music. In addition, the BSN controller can detect the emotion of the user by using the data from the sensor nodes transmitted through on-body communication channel.